IT Dribble

So I was back the stupid clients that had the crappy mdaemon / IMAP setup. This time upgrading there MS Office version to 2003 in an effort to stop the IMAP pst file hitting the 2GB limit. Anyway after pulling my hair out to get it to use the 2003 UNICODE PST type store I came across this post: link

“This issue occurs if the DWORD value for the NewPSTFormat registry entry is set to 2. This condition requires Outlook to use the Unicode-based personal folders (.pst) file format. This file format is incompatible with IMAP. ” Fuck! Looks like stupid internet standards win again!

You know the worst part – The client is a lawyer and he explicitly asked me in a email if this will fix the problem, to which I replied “Yes it will”

Now I just need to find that damn message…….

Had a client whose print queue would jam up and they couldn’t restart the printer spooler until you manually cleared the spooled documents. So I stole this piece of code and put it in a batch file. Works wonders!

@echo off
net stop "print spooler"
del /q "%SystemRoot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*"
net start "print spooler"

Update: The reason the spooler was dying was because when he printed a PDF document he would close Acrobat before the document finished and in turned killed the Print Spooler. Because we charge by the hour, he didn’t want it to be investigated any further, which is fine by me!

With my OpenSuSe and SLES Linux installations I was trying to remember how to add the rc prefix to MailScanner so I didn’t have to type /etc/init.d/MailScanner restart. All you need to do it add a symlink in /usr/sbin called rcmailscanner pointing to /etc/init.d/MailScanner. I cant believe Im forgot such a simple thing! DoH!

I got bored of not having something useful displayed when logging into my box so I wrote a script and put it in cron.hourly now I get some “info” such as:

Latest Logins:
Latest SSH Failures: Total Count:
Latest SSH Errors:
Latest 10 /var/log/messages entries:
Latest Hardware Errors:
Latest DMESG Messages:

Click Read More to grab the code (It outputs pretty colours lol)

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This is a guide, Not a step by step walkthrough! What are you an end user or an admin? FFS!

First create a new outlook data file in outlook – give appropriate name (eg. Archive 2008)

delete all the messages that you backed up (Organised by date helps )

Properties – Advanced – Compress Now – Waiting a long time (hours if we are talking gigabytes)