I received my replacement battery from Dell this week. I took out the old battery from my laptop, put it in the box the replacement battery came in, and dropped the box in the local USPS mailbox to be returned for recycling. Then I thought, “What if the battery goes boom!” It must be nice for USPS to get the business but there could be consequences.
Month: August 2006
Digg is interesting but I rarely go beyond the headlines
I subscribe to both Digg and Slashdot RSS feeds. What I find interesting is that despite reading the feeds daily I rarely find much to write about. Most of the time I find that I read the headlines and click through on only a few links per day. This has me wondering about my reading habits and the relative value in reading these feeds. Hmm…
Smigrate Cheat sheet
Using Smigrate to dump SharePoint to a .CAB file
Dean’s presentation to the Puget Sound Users Group had yet another nugget of information on SharePoint. Did you know that sharepoint comes with another admin tool other than sbsadm.exe. It comes with…
smigrate.exe !!
So what can it do?
- Works with sites based on WMSDE
- Size is unlimited
- Requires Admin Access
- Pick and choose site content
- Pick and choose sites
- Allows you to migrate between WSS versions
So what can’t it do?
- Does not preserve customization or security
- Will not overwrite existing sites
So what does it do? well, run it! It’s located %Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN\
Here is the help for smigrate (acquired by typing “smigrate /?”
Backs up or restores a SharePoint Web site.Usage (backup): smigrate -w -f [-e] [-y]
Usage (restore): smigrate -r -w -f [-x]Operations and Parameters:
-f Backup filename – required. Specify a filename with the extension .fwp.
-e Exclude subsites during backup – optional. No parameters.
-r Restore – optional. No parameters.
-w Website URL – required. Valid URL to a SharePoint Web site.
-x Exclude security during restore – optional. No parameters.
-y Confirm that you want to overwrite an existing backup file.
-u Administrator username.
-pw Administrator password.
Specify * as the password to be prompted for a password.Example backup:
smigrate -w http://server -f backup.fwp
smigrate -w http://server -f c:\backups\backup.fwp
smigrate -w http://server -f \\share\folder\backup.fwp
smigrate -w http://server -f c:\backups\backup.fwp -e -yExample restore:
smigrate -r -w http://server -f backup.fwp
smigrate -r -w http://server -f c:\backups\backup.fwp
smigrate -r -w http://server -f \\share\folder\backup.fwp
smigrate -r -w http://server -f c:\backups\backup.fwp -x
Now here’s the fancy thing: rename .fwp to .cab, then crack the file open with windows explorer. Surprise, there’s all your files.
Have fun with this one. 🙂
RE: Microsoft White papers on Malware and Spam via the SBS Diva
Security docs on the web today….
And interestingly enough they are in the “Midsized” documentation…but in reality these topics aren’t limited by the size of the firm.
Download details: Strategies for Managing Malware Risks:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=89ecfe72-03d4-4f3e-a673-49bcf840fa22&displaylang=enDownload details: How to protect E-mail Confidentiality in Regulated Industries:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E1530881-F77F-40BD-86BB-36A5BDE219E9&displaylang=enDownload details: Fighting Spam in an Exchange Server Environment:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2cd77472-beb3-40e5-a4b5-5ff8baf65997&displaylang=enDownload details: How to Protect Insiders from Social Engineering Threats:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=05033e55-aa96-4d49-8f57-c47664107938&displaylang=en
Groundwork/Nagios Revisited
Awhile back I got interested in Groundwork and downloaded two virtual machines, one from Tony Su and one from Ginaluca. The one from Tony Su was a little hard for me to setup initially so I downloaded a second one made by Gianluca. Gianluca’s virtual machine, baywatchos, appealed to me because it used Centos rather than SUSE, he had pre-installed Webmin, and he had prepared it as a virtual machine. For some reason Tony prepared his machine as a virtual disk so I had to read some more of VMware manual to get it to work.
I ran baywatchos for about a week. It was primarily a training exercise for me so I could become familiar with Groundwork and Nagios. I really don’t need a network monitor for my small network but I was curious what the network monitor would tell me about my network. Everything looked fine but for a reason I have not figured out I never was able to get Groundwork status and reports to update with the information I could see in Nagios. That was when I decided to go back to Tony Su’s version and see if it worked there.
Having already setup a nominally working Groundwork/Nagios system on batwatchos it was easy to move the configuration over to the SUSE version. Groundwork status and reports finally worked as expected.
My next task was getting email alerts. This was complicated by the lack of a nice email interface like Thunderbird. I wanted to see if the emails were being generated and sent. I ended up relearning Mailx to verify the mail configuration but I still wanted a GUI mail interface. I also wanted to install VMware tools. New software intuitive was not as intuitive as YUM and was further complicated by the fact that I needed the cd-roms to install new software. This is changed in SUSE 10.1 I think. I also needed the gcc compiler to install VMware tools. This is first Linux/Unix installation that did not install the compiler by default. After messing around for too long with possible shortcut methods, I downloaded the cd-roms for the gcc installation and Thunderbird installation from the Mozilla site. I did find some rpms on the SUSE site for for Thunderbird and Firefox they did not like the library versions in SUSE 10.
So everything is working. I am getting alerts when my websites get slow or we have network congestion. I learned way too much about YaST. In fact my frustrations with SUSE almost motivated me to try my hand at installing Open SUSE 10.1. Fortunately I walked away from the edge of the cliff. I still slightly interested in emailing daily reports as a support option but I have to brush up on my Perl LWP debugging to get it to work.
My First Post with Word Writer
This is my first post using Windows Live Writer. So far it looks pretty cool. I just got finished looking at the html and did not find any word style bloat. I will probably be comparing this with w.bloggar over the next couple of days.
The first problem that I found was when I modified this post online and then went back to WLW to modify it again, it did not use the latest version of the post even when I asked to. It seems to only want to use the local version. It retrieved other non WLW posts from the blog okay.
Earth 911: recycling centers, water pollution and conservation, Earth Day
Earth 911: recycling centers, water pollution and conservation, Earth Day
A nice resource for locating drop off centers for recycling computers, fluorescent lights, CRTs, etc.