The Frugal Tech

Here is a nice video showing how to set up LPD print services in Windows so you can share a non-networkable printer on the network.

http://youtu.be/TmksGlGgz1Q

This is a very common issue if you are sending email with multiple invoice or statement attachments.

If you are using IIS 6 Smart Host to relay email:

• Open Internet Information Services (IIS) 6 Manager
• Expand the default domain
• Right click on the [SMTP Virtual Server #1] and select properties
• Click on the messages tab in increase the following:

Limit message size to (KB): default is 2048 so increase it to 20480

Limit session size to (KB): default is 10340 increase it to at least the size of the Limit message size.

•  Click OK and resend the email.

If you are sending directly to your SMTP provider check with them to see what the message size limits are because many will set that to 2 MB like Google Applications. The reason for the limit is so the SMTP server does not get bogged down trying to scan the email with spam filter and processing large requests.

Hope this helps.

They have been experiencing electrical storms over the past couple of weeks. When I went into Backup Exec the tape drive was offline. I brought the tape drive back online and ran a tape erase to test and it was successful. Sometime just restarting all the Backup Exec services works just as well.

An information technology disaster can be defined as any event or series of events which halt the production capability of any information system.  An organization deletes an Excel spreadsheet being used to keep track of sales or inventory is a disaster. Another organization has a fire in the data center and due to fire suppression techniques the server hardware is damaged is a disaster. Regardless of the physical magnitude, it a system’s production capability is lost the organization has suffered a disaster.

Every organization needs to define information technology disasters within each information technology system in use. Evaluations can take the form of hiring a Systems Analyst or even brainstorming. Identify the systems that if lost, will result in halting production capabilities within the organization. Refrain from passing judgment at this time since the emphasis is on identification and not change.

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Creating groups in Google Applications can create a group for documentation collaboration and email. Creating a group for email means that the members will not be visible to the recipients

• Log into your Google Applications account using an Administrator account.
• With the new Dashboard find the Groups – “Manage groups of users and mailing lists”
• Click on the Groups section
• Click on the shortcut located towards the upper right hand corner of the page to create a new group.
• On the Create new group page enter the following:

1. Name of the group – A name to call the group.
2. Group email address – Email address that the group will use. This cannot be an email address that already exists within the Google Applications domain.
3. Access Level – I generally keep this at the team level so that users can send email to the group but cannot see the members.
4. Click Create

• Once the group is created you will be redirected to the group’s application page.
• To add users to the group click on Manage users in (name of group)
• In the Add new members section entry the email addresses you want in the group. The email address does not have to be a member of the domain.
• Once you have added the members press the Add button.
• NOTE: At any time you can add all members of the domain to the group. This is very important if you are considering adding an email group for all employees or students if the domain is for a school.
• Once the users have been added you can exit the group and test within an email client by sending email to the group email address.
• You can also add other groups to the new group by adding the group email address to the newly created group.
• Restrict Ability to Send Email to the Group – You can restrict the ability to send email to the group by setting the owner as the only one who can send email. What that does is restrict the ability to “Reply to” and for unauthorized personnel from using the group email address to spam the members of the group.  This can be set up by clicking on the new group – Role and permissions – Custom and removing the check mark from all by the Owner group. Click Save changes

Hope you enjoyed this brief overview of creating groups in Google Application. If you have any questions please let me know and I will be happy to answer them.

In Backup Exec will at time have issues with tape drives. Data inconsistency can be due to a couple of reasons:

1. Bad media.
2. Bad tape drive Read the rest of this entry »

This problem is related to Backup Exec’s GRT (Granular Recovery Technology) having issue with an Exchange log file. The best method to resolve the issue is to disable GRT within the backup job. Let the backup run and check the logs again after the backup job has run. You should see that the bad log files have been removed and the only log files left are those that were not committed to the Exchange mailbox database.

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Problem: Set up the Cygwin crontab on a Windows 7 PC, but now it will not run the crontab entries unless the user is logged into the PC.

Analysis: Windows does not recognize the Cygwin BASH terminal server since it is not part of the Windows environment. In order to have Windows recognize the Cygwin BASH environment the Cygwin crontab needs to be a service on the Windows operating system.

Troubleshooting:
Cygwin Crontab service
1. In Windows 7 right click on Cygwin Terminal and select Run as Administrator
2. In the Cygwin Terminal type cron-config and press enter
3. Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? (yes/no) yes
4. Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [] press enter
5. Do you want the cron daemon to run as yourself? (yes/no) no
6. Were the passwords of all cron users saved with “passwd –R”, or are you using the cyglsa package ? (yes/no) yes
7. Do you want to start the cron daemon as a services now? (yes/no) no
8. The Cygwin Terminal should return to a prompt.
9. In a command window on the windows system open services by typing services.msc
10. Right click on Cron daemon and select properties.
11. On the General tab ensure the service is set to start “automatic” and start the service.
12. On the Log On tab select Local System account and click the OK button.

At this point you should be good to run any user’s crontab regardless of whether the user is logged in or not logged into the server or PC. The key is to have the service running automatically and as a Local System account to make it work.

This is a beginners game of lackjacks that does not use any functions, arrays, or pointers. This is an excellent project to get to know the basics of C++ since you will be using variables, conditional statements, loops, and basic console I/O (input/output). This is a Windows 32 bit console application, so you should be able to paste this code into a blank project that you added a source page.

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Adding a custom thumbnail to a YouTube video is not hard. Google just wants to ensure the account is not being used by a spammer. So all you need to do to activated the custom thumbnail for your video is allow them to call or text you then you enter the number provided by Google. At that point you will now be able to upload a custom thumbnail.

Side Note: I create thumbnails by playing the video on my PC, pausing it and using a screen capture application like “Snipping Tool” to crop out a thumbnail and save it as a PNG file.

If you want to embed a video but do not want the relational video links at the end but want the custom thumbnail to load all you need to do is add “?rel=0” (zero) to your video’s URL. That tells YouTube not to load related videos and to load your thumbnail once the video plays thought.

Why would you want to perform these two actions?

1. You are creating a training video that you want to be shown on YouTube.
2. You created an advertisement video for your organization.
3. You do not have much control over the relational videos that are displayed and one that has inappropriate content or thumbnail might be loaded at the end of your video. Like if you are a school and a related video related to sex education appears at the end of your video.

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions.