Posts

Posted on

Windows Terminal Server – Three Ways to Disable AVG Tray Icon via Group Policy

I scoured the internet forever and a day to find a way to disable the AVG tray icon in a Windows Terminal Server environment because as with most people, even though to make any major changes in the AVG settings it does require an admin password, I didn’t want my users to be able to toy around in there even, let alone run a bunch of malicious scans and slow the server down for everybody or gain access to view our AVG Business license key. I even contacted AVG technical support and they didn’t have a solution to my problem and I find it extremely hard to believe that I am the only person out there in the world facing this issue.

Well, today I finally figured out a way to disable the AVG tray icon via Group Policy using Software Restriction Policies. By creating a rule to prevent the running of the “avgui.exe” process, you can essentially disable the tray icon. As long as you have your group policies structured so that your users OU get a different group policy than say the admins OU, then the admins can still get into AVG, run any scans, or change any settings inside AVG. I guess I should mention that you could use this for any OU for that matter that you didn’t want to have access to the AVG UI, it’s not just limited to Remote Desktop Servers. Pretty sweet!
Continue reading “Windows Terminal Server – Three Ways to Disable AVG Tray Icon via Group Policy”

Posted on

Cisco SPA500S Excel Sidecar Template

Here is an Excel spreadsheet I found somewhere on the internet and modified to be the exact dimensions for the Cisco SPA500S sidecar (aka the Attendant Console) that works with any of the SPA 5xxG series of IP phones. I’ve even added extra columns to be able to add an extension and a description if you want for each line key button, which is perfect for a call center type environment. All you have to do is fill out the line keys you want on the template, print it out on any 8.5×11 sheet of paper (or any size paper that will fit the cells for that matter), then brush up on your kindergarten cutting skills and you’re in business. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Cisco SPA500S Excel Sidecar Template”

Posted on

Exchange Server 2010 – Increase Number of Move Requests by the Mailbox Replication Service

If your in a bind, your server can spare the extra resources, and you’ve got a lot of mailboxes to move to a different database in a hurry for one reason or another, you will probably want to edit the “MSExchangeMailboxReplication.exe.config” file located in the “Bin” folder of your server’s installation directory to increase the performance of the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication Service. For a complete listing of the variables and their options in the config file, check out this site.
Continue reading “Exchange Server 2010 – Increase Number of Move Requests by the Mailbox Replication Service”

Posted on

Exchange Server 2010 – Shrink Database Size – OR – Reclaim Lost Database Storage Space

As mentioned in a previous post, if you’re Email Server is running out of hard drive space and you’re in a world of hurt, there are several steps you must take to get that space back. Even if you have your user’s tidy up their mailbox and you force delete out their RecoveryItems folders, you will essentially be creating free whitespace to store more messages but the size of your database will never shrink below it’s current state. To actually shrink size of the database file, you will have to do the following:

  1. Have the end users get rid of all their unimportant emails and empty their Deleted Items folder.
  2. Purge all of the user’s RecoveryItems folders. To learn how, read this.
  3. Either create a new mailbox database, mount it, move all the mailboxes to it, then dismount and delete the old database

    — OR —
    Dismount the databases and run the defrag utility

Either way, both scenarios are extremely time consuming so get your blanket and sun tan lotion because you’re never getting off that beach, just the way you never got into the NHL, ya jackass!
Continue reading “Exchange Server 2010 – Shrink Database Size – OR – Reclaim Lost Database Storage Space”

Posted on

Hackintosh – Install UniBeast on a 128 GB PNY USB Thumb Drive

While dicking around trying to get UniBeast 5.0 to install on a 128 GB PNY thumb drive so I could install Yosemite on a PC at work, I ran across several posts on tonymacx86.com saying that thumb drives over 32 GB weren’t supported (here is an example) and that a bunch of users were saying that they had to go out and buy new ones and to that I say “fuck that”.
Continue reading “Hackintosh – Install UniBeast on a 128 GB PNY USB Thumb Drive”

Posted on

Bash Script – Log Concurrent Asterisk Calls to MySQL and Other Useful One-Liners

Here is a quick and dirty bash script I threw together today to log the concurrent calls for each of my long distance trunks in Asterisk to a MySQL database to be able to quickly analyze usage trends. Sure there is probably other open-source software out there that can do this and give pretty little graphs and what not (cdr-stats or maybe queue metrics come to mind), but where’s the fun in that? As I mentioned, the script is extremely primitive (just the bare minimum as I didn’t have much time to spend on it) and contains no error checking whatsoever but it could also be used as a pretty handy one-liner in bash.

Show all active SIP Calls on a single trunk

asterisk -x "core show channels verbose" | grep "^SIP/yourSIPTrunkName-"

Show concurrent number of SIP Calls on a single trunk

asterisk -x "core show channels verbose" | grep -c "^SIP/yourSIPTrunkName-"

Show all active DAHDI calls on channels 1-24
Continue reading “Bash Script – Log Concurrent Asterisk Calls to MySQL and Other Useful One-Liners”

Posted on

Exchange Server 2010 – Purge the Deleted Items (RecoverableItems) Folder

Being the devoted Email Administrator that you are, you notice that the space for storing mailboxes on your Exchange Server is getting dangerously low, so you decide to take action. Logically, your first thought would be to have all your end users go through all the folders in their mailbox and get rid of any junk they don’t need and then empty their “Deleted Items” folder to regain the space back. After all, in most cases there really is no reason for users to keep every single email they’ve ever sent and received since the beginning of time (which a lot of them tend to do and I’ll never understand why).

Unfortunately, as you’ve probably already noticed, that is not the case. Simply having a user empty their “Deleted Items” folder has no effect on the database size whatsoever. This is partially due to the nifty feature that allows users to be able to recover deleted messages after they’ve already emptied their trash. By default, Exchange keeps deleted items for 14 days until they are purged, so now it is necessary to manually force the deletion of these items.
Continue reading “Exchange Server 2010 – Purge the Deleted Items (RecoverableItems) Folder”

Posted on

Windows 8.1 – Disable IPv6 Components

While trying to troubleshoot some issues with a user’s flaky VPN connection (they could get connected but couldn’t ping anything on the company network), my first guesses were that it was either a routing issue and that IPv6 might be the culprit or that it could be an MTU issue. In searching for the answers on how to disable IPv6, I had stumbled across a blog article that, while seemingly helpful at the time, had some misleading information on it that caused some rather undesirable results. It gave me an incorrect registry value setting of “0xffffffff” that actually caused Windows to take an extra five seconds to boot.
Continue reading “Windows 8.1 – Disable IPv6 Components”

Posted on

Indecision 2012 – Lyrics by Nathan Thomas

You can listen to my song here.

Verse 1
How long can we sit and choose between the lesser of two evils
When the only real choice is to make no choice at all
Republicans, Democrats, they’re just two-faced sycophants
When they’re already bought and paid for, America doesn’t stand a chance
We are the land of the tyranny, home of the slave
With no Bill of Rights left, there’s no country left to save
This election year, twenty twelve, the year of Obamney
One’s a murderous dictator scum and the other’s a complete commie
No more posse comitatus, the states arming all around us
More than a billion bullets purchased, while these FEMA camps surround us
Better grab your gun, your kids, your keys, your car, your wallet and your wife
And take a tip or two from me before they come and raid your house at night
Freedom isn’t free, I won’t go down without a fight
I’m gonna take it to ’em till I’m blue and I’m no longer feeling this disgust inside
No I’m not a hater, I just want a decent choice or two
In the twenty twelve election the real loser is you
Continue reading “Indecision 2012 – Lyrics by Nathan Thomas”

Posted on

Bash Script – Convert a Batch of WAV Files to SLINEAR Format for Asterisk Hold Music

Here are a couple of useful one-liners that I picked up from voip-info.org a while back to manipulate a bunch of audio files in a single directory with Sox. You can save yourself some processing power on your Asterisk PBX if all of your hold music is in SLINEAR format that way no transcoding has to take place.
Continue reading “Bash Script – Convert a Batch of WAV Files to SLINEAR Format for Asterisk Hold Music”