First, some helpful information:

OEM Dell installation CDs depend on the SLP code in the Dell BIOS for activation.  If the installation program can’t see the real bios, it can’t activate.  With a commercially purchased installation CD this is not a problem as you have a COA that can be activated on line or by phone.  OEM installation CDs cannot be activated on line, and since Dell is responsible for support of an OEM disk that was issued by Dell, Microsoft will not normally give you an activation key if you call them.  You can try the phone method, of course, since so far as I can tell you are running only Windows XP Pro rather than both Vista and Windows XP.  Once you explain what you are doing they might grant you an activation code.

If you are installing an OEM version onto a virtual machine, it will not activate as it cannot see the BIOS String of the real Dell machine. It is only seeing the Virtual BIOS which doesn’t have the SLP String to activate.

How to resolve this:

1. Boot up XP Pro VM installation, and select the Telephone activation option for the XP activation.
2. Call MS. Try to go on to speak to a representative to explain further.
3. Here it’s important to explain exactly what you’re doing to the rep — Explain that you simply want to activate this one XP license, on the Dell with which it was purchased, but you are doing so in a virtual machine. They can quickly confirm why it’s not working, due to not seeing the real BIOS.
4. You should end up transferred to the Product Key Team.
5. Once connected with the Product Key Team, they should provide you with a new product key (after confirming you are installing XP on the Dell that it came with and installing just one instance) there are a couple more steps — after entering the new product key, give the new activation code to the rep, get the confirmation to enter in the activation screen; and with luck, success!

Specifically:

mkfifo /var/spool/postfix/public/pickup
ps aux | grep mail
kill
sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart


After some searching, I found the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Bootdisk / CD which worked perfectly.

• Download the CD image
• Burn to a CD
• Boot to the CD
• A small linux program runs
• Answer a few questions about what partition and the user(s) you need to clear and/or reset the password for
• Write your changes to the disk

You can also edit the registry if you need to hack some bad keys out of there, like spyware startup entries.

Super handy tool!

http://www.coreftp.com/server/

You give it a username and password and a directory where the user should end up. Simple, but effective.

CoreFTP setup

I had Apple Mail.app running and connected to that mailbox. I didn’t really notice it until a few minutes later when a message came in on another account.

My work account was blank. Empty. Also, I had a nice exclamation point saying the account couldn’t be found.

Whoops. Oh hell.

I have my computer hooked to an external hard drive which I’m using as my Time Machine (the built-in Mac backup software) drive. I poked through the folders from an hour ago and found all my mail.

The mail is stored in ~/Library/Mail/, where each IMAP account has a folder called IMAP-user@host. This folder contains many folders with the .imapmbox extension.

Here’s how I restored my mailbox:

• Recreated my home directory and made sure that the email address still worked. You may want to set up a new account if you’re moving hosts or whatever. Get a working IMAP account up and running.
• Put the IMAP-user@host folder to my Desktop. Actually, I restored it from Time Machine and then copied it to the Desktop. I selected “Keep both” when doing the Time Machine restore which renamed my existing folder to end in “(original)”. I moved the restored folder to my Desktop and removed the “(original)”.
• Renamed each folders’ extension from .imapmbox to .mbox . Make sure you get any subfolders as well.
• Import the file: File > Import Mailboxes > Mail for Mac OS X
• Select the parent folder (IMAP-user@host) containing all your .mbox files.
• Your mail will be imported to a folder named Import inside the On My Mac folder.
• Drag your mail to your new/restored IMAP mailbox. I copied 5000 messages at a time without an issue.

Hopefully you never need this information.

If it helped you out or if you have any other information, please let me know in the comments.

If you turn that option, you have three options for message format: HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text. The first two allow colors, the third doesn’t.

If you pick Rich Text, then the way that your attachments look will change. When you prepare a new message and add an attachment, it will appear in the body of the message instead of in the attachment bar. Switching to HTML formatting will put it back the other way.

I’m assuming this is because you can actually specify the location of the attachment in the Rich Text format, which would be handy because you could refer the ‘below attachment’ if there were multiple ones.

Another obscure “feature” that changes without warning!

Enter Process Explorer: (info on MS Technet | download)

So far, the graph window (see the second screenshot below) has been super helpful to me. I can set the scan interval to a couple seconds, let it run for a while, and come back. The graph not only stores the CPU usage, but also the process that was running! So, you can mouse-over the graph and get historical information about something chewing up CPU, memory, or I/O.

First, you have the option to select that you’re logging on from a “private” or “public” computer. The default for “private” is 20 minutes, while the default for “public” is two hours. If you log in at home on a weekend and are checking back every-so-often, this might be a pain because you’d be timed out every two hours.

So, I poked around to find the setting that controls this. Turns out there are registry keys for both of the values that you can modify.

Browse to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeWeb\OWA\ and you’ll find two keys:

• PublicClientTimeout – timeout when someone picks public (default of 20 minutes)
• TrustedClientTimeout – timeout when someone picks private (default of 120 minutes = 2 hours)

I suggest changing this to 1440 (for 12 hours) or 2880 (for 24 hours) so users can stay logged in longer.

The server in question wasn’t available over the network. Troubleshooting:

• The server could ping the loopback and static IP it was assigned.
• The server could not ping the gateway or any other computers on the network, returning the error “Destination Host Unreachable”.
• The network connection said “Connected” and the network cable was switched just in case.
• The switch and router were both power-cycled.

Looking at the System event log, I saw this:

Event 4292 (IPSec): The IPSec driver has entered Block mode. IPSec will discard all inbound and outbound TCP/IP network traffic that is not permitted by boot-time IPSec Policy exemptions.

User Action: To restore full unsecured TCP/IP connectivity, disable the IPSec services, and then restart the computer. For detailed troubleshooting information, review the events in the Security event log.

The security log wasn’t helpful at all.

I found this MSKB that fixed the issue of IPSec being corrupted. Repairing IPSec and restarting restored network connectivity. I’m not sure that this had anything to do with the original problem, but it showed up after installing Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 and rebooting for that installation.

While looking at the task manager, I noticed a process that was using 1.6 GB of RAM. This sqlserver.exe process was going wild!

I turned on the process IDs in Task Manager (View > Select Columns) so I could get a process ID for the offending process. For me, it was process id 1664. Then, I turned to the console for some troubleshooting:

C:\tasklist /svc /fi "PID eq 1664"

You should change your process id to match if you’re running this at home.

Image Name                     PID Services
========================= ======== =======================
sqlservr.exe                  1664 MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE


Microsoft SSEE shows in the services panel as Windows Internal Database, which is the database for Windows Software Update Services. Now that we know the instance name, we can reconfigure it:

C:\osql -E -S MICROSOFT##SSEE
1> sp_configure ’show advanced options’, 1;
2> reconfigure;
3> go
Configuration option ’show advanced options’ changed from 0 to 1.
  Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.
1> sp_configure ‘max server memory’, 512;
2> reconfigure;
3> go
Configuration option ‘max server memory (MB)’ changed from
  2147483647 to 512. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.
1> exit

While you’re at it, you may want to reconfigure the SBSMONITORING database instance if you’re running SBS. I set mine to 70 MB.