We've been working through a problem recently where largish uploads of files would reliably fail - but not in the way you'd expect. A typical course of events would be:

• Client uploads file via SSH, SFTP or FTP
• Upload might drop out a couple of times during the process, but resume OK - or might not have any dropouts
• Upload finishes. Client & server confirm checksum of uploaded file - it doesn't match, so then retries the upload again
• Repeat ad infinitum.

Our particular problem was with Storage Craft Image Manager uploading images to a remote server.

Connecting to an RDP / Terminal Server from a Mac can be a little hit and miss. This is because the RDP protocol keeps changing, and Microsoft don't update the Mac client to keep abreast of this.

Using CORD makes this significantly easier: http://cord.sourceforge.net .

This will allow you to connect easily, and forward local printers etc.

CORD will use the "HP Colour Laserjet 8500 PS" as the generic driver to pass through to the server however. This driver is not available for Windows Server 2008 R2, so you need to engage in a little trickery.

-         Install a universal HP PS driver (search for Colour Laserjet 4350n Postscript driver) - found here

-         Create a custom printer redirect mapping file and a couple of registry settings. Good Microsoft Article on how to do this found here

Example File contents: c:\windows\inf\ntprintsubs.inf

 ;NTPRINTSUBS.INF

;Printer mapping file for client-side to server-side drivers 

[Printers]
"HP Color LaserJet 8500 PS" = "HP Universal Printing PS"
"HP Color LaserJet CP4520 Series" = "HP Universal Printing PS"

You need to put this in c:\windows\inf and create the two registry keys described in this article: (these are the values I used)

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\Wds\rdpwd
    Create new REG_SZ key #1: PrinterMappingINFName
    Value: c:\windows\inf\ntprintsubs.inf

    Create new REG_SZ key #2: PrinterMappingINFSection
    Value: Printers

If you're using ShadowProtect and connect via VPN whilst remote back to the office then ShadowProtect may attempt to do a backup over the VPN link. Backups occur using the CIFS protocol which is very unfriendly with WAN links, and will result in extraordinarily high transfers (both upload and download).

Similarly, if you are in your regular office, and you connect to a VPN you should disable ShadowProtect, because it might end up being routed back to your own network via the VPN tunnel. This will occur if the backup target is in a different subnet than the computer Shadow Protect is running on. Not advisable at all!

Note: you will need to understand subnets and routing to use this article

If you create a VPN tunnel in Windows 7 and need to have subsidiary routes created once this tunnel is created, then one way of doing this is by creating a scheduled task that fires when this connection is made. For example:

ShadowProtect is an awesome tool, but one of it's weaknesses is that it does not allow you to specify exclusions during the backup process. So if you know that a particular directory is going to generate a lot of files that you don't need during the day, then right now you still have to back this up.

Common reaons for not wanting / needing to backup include:

If you're using Shadow Protect and Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager, then you've probably run into the issue that SEP generates several Gb per day in diffs, none of which are required for backups. Worse, it ends up costing you more in storage, and if you're trying to synchronise your backups offsite using Image Manager FTP or ShadowStream then good luck - trying to keep up with 10Gb per day of deltas just for the Antivirus component alone over imperfect ADSL just doesn't work.

So, how do you deal with this?

We recently migrated our internal Knowledge Base to Confluence. Part of the process involved linking Confluence to Active Directory... one directory to rule them all... one directory to bind them... Anyway. Doing the basic connectivity part is easy - simply following the prompts should successfully link your new Confluence instance to AD, BUT what you'll find is that you return too many users, which with Confluence can have a relatively disproproportionate cost impact. The Confluence examples don't work, and neither does the MS doco.

You won't experience this issue if:

If you have Joomla installed behind a proxy (like squid, for example) then you will not be able to use the Joomla Update feature - found under Extension Manager / Updates. When you do you'll get errors like:

Update: :Collection: Could not open http://update.joomla.org/core/list.xml

This article assumes that you're running, and familiar with administering Request Tracker. The notes are accurate for 3.8.7, and it may differ for other versions. Hopefully it'll get you a long way to solving it though, and the RT user lists are pretty good - http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users.

Something we've wanted to do for a long time is get RT to send an email to requestors based upon the value of custom fields. In our case we want to send an email to the requestor if the following are all true:

Scenario:

• User #1 wants to share calendar in Outlook / Exchange with user #2.
• User #1 does not have Outlook. User #2 does.

If you're trying to RWW to a Windows 7 PC that is joined to an SBS 2003 domain, you may be seeing a popup error along the lines of " vbscript +"an internal error has occurred". In this scenario, RWW portal doesn't allow you to connect, but you can RDP successfully from your PC directly to the target PC in question.

Assuming that you've covered off firewall issues (you are allowing TCP 4125 to both the SBS box and the Win7 client, right?), then your next place to look at is the authentication level required by the target PC. To do this (on the target PC):

 I've been feeling the slow pinch on my laptop recently, and decided to upgrad to the hybrid SSD drives to see how much they improved things. The short answer is quite a bit - it's dramatically improved some things. The results from my own testing of my laptop are detailed below. I tested by cloning my old harddrive to the new Seagate drive - Hitachi HTS723232L9A360 (320G SATA2 3Gbs 7200rpm) to Seagate Momentus XT 320Gb 7200rpm…

Some numbers (these are taken using a stopwatch, me typing to login etc so this is obviously highly unscientific, but still interesting). Times are in seconds.

For me, iTunes falls into the category of necessary evil - I don't like the software, but I need it for my phone to work.

So when you do a update and your phone no longer syncs, it's an issue. Some of the symptoms you may see for which this is relevant: