Exchange: Deleting Auditlog Mailbox

This weekend I got a call from one of my friends.  They were pulling their hair out, trying to remove a default database from a lab Exchange installation, and they kept receiving the error “The mailbox database contains one or more mailboxes, mailbox plains, archive mailboxes, public folder mailboxes, or arbitration mailboxes…”. But, looking in […]

Restart Hub Services in Exchange 2010

So, recently, I was proceeding with an Exchange 2010 to 2016 migration. And, one of the steps I needed to take was to edit the receive connectors to allow a new network printer to send unauthenticated SMTP emails. Any time you edit the receive connectors, you need to restart the hub services. Normally, I just […]

Get the AD Forest Level

Get the AD Forest Level

Many installations of third party software integrates with Active Directory, and it becomes important to know what version of AD you are running. These steps can be done from any workstation running Powershell that is a member of the domain. In my example, I did the following: Login to a workstation or server in the […]

Patch your Adobe Flash for vulnerability CVE-2018-5002!

Looks like the attack that was found in the wild has several components: A social engineering component, in which an Office document which interests the target is sent to them… could be downloaded via a webpage, emailed, or delivered via a USB thumb drive… The victim opens the document, and it auto-starts Adobe flash content… […]

Making OS X Silent

Slient-Clicking

I retired my much loved 11” Air and purchased a new MacBook rose gold laptop. One thing driving me crazy with the new trackpad. I hate the new depth sensors and the amount of noise. I was able to resolve both issues easily. Open System Preferences Click “Trackpad” In the “Point & Click” tab, enable […]

Patch your 2008 Servers!

Ransom-Patch

Unless you’ve been traveling without internet connectivity and access to newspapers, you must have heard about the recent ransomware which was propagating based upon a Microsoft Windows SMB bug. This is a quick blog with the information you need to validate that your 2008 and 2008R2 servers are not vulnerable to the exploit. For 2008 […]

Upgrading Android on a Samsung Mobile, Part2

SmartSwitch-Upgrade

In my last blog post, I showed how to install the software called Samsung SmartSwitch on an Apple laptop. The software is also available for Windows. It provides several features, including backing up data, restoring data, and syncing data between devices. The feature I was interested in was upgrading. Having said that, you should always […]

Upgrading Android on a Samsung Mobile

android SmartSwitch Install

I wanted to upgrade the version of Android of my Samsung phone. I was expecting to download firmware on the phone’s WIFI, but it was giving me an error message. Maybe it requires an activated SIM to function? I have no idea. After some searching about, I determined that for Android 4.3+ I could download […]

Enabling Copy and Paste in Firefox

Firefox Setting copy and paste

Today, I needed to fill out an online web form, and was very frustrated that it was setup to disallow copy and paste. Why would I want to type field values manually, especially important ones, when I can copy and paste them from a password database? I’m sure the web developer thought they were increasing […]

Setup DNS on Apple OS X

Apple-Find-DNS

When you enable DHCP, you normally get both an IP address and DNS servers from the DHCP server. Sometimes, however, you don’t want those DNS servers because using random DNS servers can open you to DNS poisoning. One way of being more secure is to hardcode to the Google public DNS servers. This works great […]