liggyman’s blog

I recently migrated an XP Virtual machine from VMWare to KVM. The process required doing a system repair using the XP install cd.

After doing this image attachments in Thunderbird were being opened by IE instead of the Windows Image Viewer. The image viewer wasn’t even an option to use.

I had to run the following from a command prompt to resolve the issue:

regsvr32 /i shimgvw.dll

If you do incremental or diff based backups, or if you compress your Windows Virtual Machine you will find that this tip will save you plenty of time, bandwidth, and disk space.

The Windows page file changes constantly and is large. It’s up to 4GB on some of my Virtualized workstations. It also doesn’t compress well and is really not needed in your backups.

By filling the pagefile with zeros when shutting the VM down to do a backup, that part of the image will be unchanged between increments/diffs. It will also compress down to almost nothing.

To achieve this we need to set one registry key to do this you can import the following from a .reg file or make the appropriate changes manually.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
“ClearPageFileAtShutdown”=dword:00000001

I recently assisted someone on IRC with a network issue they were having with pfSense related to bogon networks. The cause was a stale bogons file which didn’t take the latest assignment into account.

[removed bogons file contents]

On pfSense this file is located at:
/etc/bogons

Update:
I did some further research into this and discovered that the bogons file is actually updated on the first of every month using a cron job. The script that is run uses a random delay to prevent hammering of the pfSense server. The file that is retrieved is located at http://files.pfsense.org/bogon-bn-nonagg.txt. I have verified that this file is up to date.

The update bogons script is located at: /etc/rc.update_bogons.sh

Running the script at the end of the build process is a good idea if you don’t want to update the bogons file directly. For immediate results you will want to create a copy of the script and edit out the parts that create a delay run the script with the ‘now’ argument.

/etc/rc.update_bogons.sh now

Sometimes you need a quick and dirty way of resetting a MySQL root password. Typical scenario is when taking over Administrative duties on a server which has no documentation.

First we need stop MySQL and start it with the –skip-grant-tables option set:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables

Then we login to mysql as root:

mysql -u root mysql

Once logged in we can set the new password:

UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('NewPassword') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Warning: This is not the most secure way of doing this. I disconnect the server from the network before doing this, and reconnect after.

I was deploying and testing an Outlook plugin for a client the other day. On one machine I came across an error message when launching Outlook 2003.
 

The message:

 
The Solution:

• Rename the extend.dat file to something like extend.dat.backup.
• The next time Outlook is launched the extend.dat file will be recreated.

I converted my main workstation at home to a virtual machine, and started connecting to it via RDP from a thin client machine. I found that images didn’t look quite right, and had banding instead of proper gradients. The color depth was set to 16-bit and couldn’t be raised, even when setting the depth higher using the RDP client.

Remote Desktop server on Windows XP, by default runs at a maximum 16-bit color depth. However up to 24-bit color is supported. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then I will be multitasking and will move the Show Desktop icon off the Quick Launch toolbar.  Sometimes clients will delete this icon not realizing how much they actually use it.

To replace it open Notepad and enter the following text:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file as ‘Show Desktop.scf’ and place it in the ‘%userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch’ folder.

I was unable to add x64 print drivers (for distribution to 64bit clients) on a 32bit Windows Server 2008 install.  This is the workaround:

1. On an x64 machine browse to \\servername, where servername is the x86 print server.  (Start -> Run…, type ‘\\servername’.
2. In the list of shares, open the Printers folder.
3. Right-click in the Printers folder and select Server Properties.
4. Go to the drivers tab and add a new x64 driver.

The other day, by chance, I came across the built in status bar quota usage display.  I had accidentally set the storage limit on one of my mailboxes to ‘null’.  In turn Thunderbird presented me with a red bar warning me that I was way over my quota.

Today, I decided I wanted the usage to display on my IMAP accounts at all times.  This is what needs to be done:

1. In Thunderbird go to Tools -> Options…
2. Select the ‘Advanced‘ panel, under the ‘General‘ tab, click the ‘Config Editor…‘ button.
3. Find the following setting:  ’mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show‘ and set it’s value to ‘0‘

Thunderbird needs to restart for this setting to take effect.

Additionally, there are options for setting the Warning and Critical thresholds.  These cause the precentage bar to change to yellow and red.

mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical

I recently setup ISPConfig 3 RC2, on an Ubuntu 8.04 server following the install instructions provided on the ISPConfig site.  I did however experience an issue with inbound mail being rejected for valid mailboxes with the following error:

Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Diagnostic-Code: x-unix; ERR: authdaemon: s_connect() failed: Permission denied
Invalid user specified.

This was resolved by changing the ‘maildrop’ line in ‘/etc/postfix/master.cf’ to:

flags=R user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/maildrop -d vmail ${extension} ${recipient} ${user} ${domain} ${sender}

Additional:

The following may also be required to fix this error:

chmod 4755 /var/run/courier/authdaemon