Month: July 2005

OpenOffice and Drop Shadows

Yesterday I was working on updating the flyers for our farm. The stuff we have on the website is okay for quick prints but I would like to tweak the flyers to take advantage of the print format. This led me on another diversion. Sometime ago I had created the flyers in WordPerfect because it had the ability to export PDF files. So when I went back to work on the old flyers I realized that I have not installed WordPerfect anywhere. The support for WordPerfect file format is practically non-existent in Word. Since I was curious I looked at OpenOffice. It had a WordPerfect filter and I knew it had the ability to export PDF files. So I installed OpenOffice on my beta machine. Technically everything worked as expected. My problem was that I needed to replace almost all of the text and pictures. So I was back to square one. Since I had Writer open I went ahead, copied the web data into the flyer, and reformatted it to my liking. I then exported the document as a PDF. That was quick and accurate but not exactly what I wanted. I wanted the export to subset the font I used for the title. Instead it substituted another font. Not a big problem but I like the font I was using so I saved the document in Word97 format and opened it in Word 2003 on my main computer. Everything looked okay except the margins and the page breaks. I printed the document to PDFCreator and got the Acrobat I file I was looking for. I knew from previous experience that PDFCreator does subset the fonts. For kicks I went back to Writer and tried to print to PDFCreator but PDFCreator failed with an error message. Since both PDFCreator and Writer use Ghostscript as their engine someday I will probably go back and try to figure out why Writer did not subset the font.

After looking at the first flyer for a bit I noticed that I had used drop shadows on one of the photos. I like the look of drop shadowns so I decided to put drop shadows on the other photo. I went to Corel PhotoPaint because I was familiar with how I used to do it in PhotoPaint. I put the Drop Shadows on but I did not get the 3D effect I wanted. I tried changing several things but it wasn’t coming together fast enough for me. So I went to Photoshop Elements and read the Help file. Despite my best effort to try and make it different than PhotoPaint the procedure was almost the same. The effect was better but not quite right. Expanding the canvas helped but I was guessing at how much to expand it. I tried the Reveal All in the Resize menu and finally got the effect I wanted. I realize now that the canvas size was probably the same problem I had with making realistic drop shadows in PhotoPaint.

Verifying SPF – Email Service Provider Coalition

Email Service Provider Coalition

My host provider, bluehost, updated my TXT record yesterday with my Sender ID info. Unlike Domainkeys the mail receiver does all of the work so I needed a way to test out the changes. The answer was easy to find. The nice folks at the Email Service Provider Coalition provides this page so that you can verify that SPF is working. This was easy!

Changing the MX record

Yesterday I changed the MX record to point at my server. Inbound SMTP works. I briefly checked out Sender ID and the SPF wizard available at http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html. I am going to send a support request in today to update my DNS to use it.

MSFN’s Unattended XP CD – Introduction

MSFN’s Unattended XP CD – Introduction

Have you ever wanted a Windows CD that would install Windows by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings?

I got carried away again! One of the default sites in the RSS reader for Desktop Sidebar was msfn.org. It just so happened that a beta for nLite had just been released. nLite is a more automatic way of creating bootable installation CD-ROM for W2K, WinXP, etc. with the service pack and patches already integrated. I am interested in having an up-to-date installation disk since it is my traditional way to fix unsolvable PC problems. A slip streamed XP is a step forward but a slip streamed XP with the patches integrated can be a major time saver and much more secure. So I installed Virtual PC 2004 Trial and nLite and went to work. After some initial success I tried Ryan’s update patch where I failed after multiple attempts. It all got very frustrating since I was very close. Yet it became even more frustrating since VPC uses all of my CPU(PIII-700) and the WinXP install under VPC was taking a very long time. I finally got smart and installed VPC on my son’s PC since he was out and his PC was available. His PC(AMD3000+) is much faster and he has the available disk space(2GB). Then I went back to the basics. I created a XP+SP2 disk image and listed the patches required. I downloaded the patches and integrated them individually into a new disk image. Now it works like a charm. I think I will try one more tweak. I am going to slipstream MP10 into the patched version. This would leave only dotnet, acrobat, and JRE for the post installation process. That would be pretty cool!

How to block open SMTP relaying and clean up Exchange Server SMTP queues in Windows Small Business Server

How to block open SMTP relaying and clean up Exchange Server SMTP queues in Windows Small Business Server

Last week I bit the bullet and ordered a static ip for my SBS server. It only costs $5/month extra. Yesterday I was informed it was ready to go in the traditional tech support way, my network stopped communicating with the internet. When I called to report the problem, they said I needed to update my router with the static IP address. Next I asked my web server provider to install an A record for the subdomain. That was finally ready today. I checked it using NSLOOKUP and www.dnsstuff.com. Then I ran ICEW and created a certificate for the new fully qualified domain name(FQDN). My final test was to login to OWA.

Since everything was working for http access I went back and ran ICEW again. This time I told it to change my email to use DNS rather than Smarthost to send mail. To test the outbound access I sent an email to my yahoo email address. Before I changed my MX record I decided to check my configuration for open SMTP relay. That is where I ran into this article. My server passed the test so I am ready to go live.

RE: Controlling your Patch Management with WSUS

If you haven’t heard yet, Windows Server Updated Service is available for download… for free!, it’s 100% compatible with your Windows Small Business Server 2003 SP1 server. Currently, the SBS writing team is working hard to get a documentation out the door to aid you with the installation and configuration of WSUS on SBS 2003 SP1.

But, why wait?

It’s certainly not hard by any means, simply download the setup.exe file, and launch it on your SBS server, then just follow the defaults, and you’re pretty much finished. However, if you have premium, you’ll need to tell WSUS your proxy server.

Finally, you need to configure the clients to look at the server for their updates. This is the tricky part. There are two major steps, granting access to the website, and configuring the group policy.

To grant access to the clients to update themselves

  1. In the Server Management Console, drill down into Advanced management, and into the default website
  2. You’ll have to do this for both the SelfUpdate and ClientWebService virtual directories. Right-click, choose Properties, click on the Directory Security tab, then IP Address and choose Granted Access for all IP addresses

Now your website is ready

Pointing the clients to the server via Group Policy

  1. Create and link a new Group Policy Object on the domain level
  2. In the Group Policy Object Editor, Expand Computer Configuration, Administration Templates, Windows Components and select Windows Update
  3. Double-click Configure Automatic Updates, click Enabled and ensure Auto download and schedule the install
  4. Then double click Specify Intranet Microsoft Update Service location and choose Enabled and type in http://{servername}:8530 into both boxes and click OK
  5. Finally, double-click No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Update installations

And that’s all there is to it. You’ll need the latest service pack for Windows 2000, or SP1 or 2 for XP for this to work. Also, as you recall, you have to wait for a period of time before policy actually takes place, or you can use the gpupdate /force to force the policy to take place.

Now, even happier patching …

[Via SeanDaniel.com on SBS 2003 & other Tech-stuff]

Desktop Sidebar Home Page

Desktop Sidebar Home Page

Desktop Sidebar provides you with instant access to the information you most desire by grabbing data from your PC and the internet. The result is a dynamic visual display you configure and control.

I am playing again! I ran something like this a couple of months ago but I ran into performance issues. This bar works and appears not to consume too many resources. It has a much slicker integration with Outlook. I like its performance panel and I am beginning to like its Newsroom panel. So far, its pretty cool!

Dual-Core Server Hits the Midmarket

Dual-Core Server Hits the Midmarket

Dell this week is introducing its first server powered by Intel Corp.’s dual-core technology. Customers buying the PowerEdge SC430 will have the option of running it on Intel’s dual-core Pentium D chip.

I was wondering when the first dual-core server would hit the market. This is a good solution for SBS folks since products like Exchange, ISA, and SQL Server will probably do quite well with multi-processors. This drops the dual processor price point to a very attractive level.

ISA Firewall Best Practices, Tips and Tricks (Part 1)

ISA Firewall Best Practices, Tips and Tricks (Part 1)

I have been having some intermittent problems. The error message pointed my in the direction of my DNS configuration so I compared my configuration to the Best Practices recommended in this document. Since my configuration was setup during the ISA 2004 install, everything should be standard. I did find two things did not match up.

  1. The WAN adapter DNS setting was pointed at the intranet DNS server. I blanked this parameter out in the GUI. This set the DNS configuration to get it automatically from the router.
  2. There were no local addresses configured in the Web Browser tab for the internal network. I added the loop back network and the local network addresses.

I also installed the Beta Release of Copylattowebproxy Script. I looked at the script and I think it populates the direct access address ranges in the web browser tab. It appears to do the same thing I just finished doing by hand but I cannot imagine why someone would create a script to do what you can do so easily by hand.

It will probably will take me some time to figure out if these changes made a difference.

WordPress Development Blog › WordPress 1.5.1.3 Available

WordPress Development Blog › WordPress 1.5.1.3 Available

It looks like it is time for another minor upgrade to fix some security issues. Oh well! This looks like a good weekend to complete this task.

T-Mobile – Downloads

T-Mobile – Downloads

I downloaded the upgrades to my Blackberry phone and desktop yesterday. It said it was fixing a variety of small problems including an extended search for the network. It did seem to fix my Error 3 problem I was getting on the Week View. The upgrade to the Desktop went without a hitch. The upgrade to the phone was more of a problem. I had updated Pocketday online. That version was replaced with the version connected to my Desktop which unfortunately was a much older version. It also reset all of my settings. I had to:

  1. Change the TCP setting so I could get the weather and stock ticker to work.
  2. Change the zipcode so I could get weather for my location.
  3. Add a stock ticker for Dow Jones. The stock ticker was blank.