Peter’s Soapbox

Lame Phishing Attempt

Here’s a lame phishing scam attempt that my mom recently received. I can’t believe people fall for this, but they do. Continue reading Lame Phishing Attempt…

New Chair - Gaiam Balance Ball Office Chair!

My new Gaiam Balance Ball Chair arrived this morning. Awesome.

Fun With Exmerge and Exchange 2003

I’ll make this post short and sweet.

Two days ago, I attempted to back up several user mailboxes for a client by using Exmerge. I attempted to run Exmerge using the Administrator account which, by design, did not work. The process would start, then fail with an error saying that the necessary rights weren’t in place, etc., etc.
So I followed the steps in an MS knowledgebase article to create a separate account, in a newly-created separate group, and granted said group the necessary permissions to run Exmerge. It didn’t work, and failed with a different error than when I ran Exmerge as Administrator. So I read up on that error, and followed more steps to resolve it. They too, did not work. So I fiddled with permissions a bit myself, all the while trying to avoid just granting EVERYTHING to the group ALL OVER the server (and I even did try that - still didn’t work).

Finally, I settled on a Technet article which walked through the errors I got, and indicated that the mailbox store was not mounted. Just to appeal to my own sanity, I verified that it was indeed mounted, because I could run Exmerge as Administrator and see mailboxes. While I was looking at Exmerge, again, as Administrator, I accidentally clicked the “next” button instead of cancel and, to my surprise, it worked.

And it’s not supposed to.

“New Version of Windows in 2009?” or “My Bet With Jason”

Inspired by a recent article which follows up on prior speculation that the successor to Windows Vista may be released as early as 2009 (furthering its marketing and user perception as “Windows Me Professional”), I decided to wager the whopping sum of $5 that it will happen! Jason Watkins has taken the bet, so here are the terms:

Microsoft will release a new major desktop OS upgrade named something other than “Vista” by Dec 31, 2009. If this does not happen, I’ll pay Jason the sum of $5. If it does happen, he’ll pay me $5. By “release,” I mean an RTM of the OS will be in the hands of any major pc manufacturer, on store shelves, or available to the public for purchase - any or all of these happening by Dec. 31 ‘09 constitute a win for me. I could try to sneak a beta in here, but I won’t, even though I feel that if MS has gotten to the point of releasing a beta of Windows 7, they’ll have given up on Vista by that time, and I’ll have won in spirit.

I’ll take my payment in the form of PayPal or an Amazon.com gift certificate. Jason, how would you like yours?

How to Install NTBackup on Windows XP Home

“I want to back up my home PC,” you say.

“Use ntbackup,” I respond.

“It doesn’t come with XP Home,” you reply.

Ah, but it does… sort of. True, NTBackup, the backup utility for Windows, is not installed by default on XP Home systems, but it is included on your installation CD. Installing it is as simple as:

1. Inserting the XP Home CD-ROM.
2. Navigating to the VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP folder.
3. Double-clicking the ntbackup.msi file to install NTBackup.

Alternately, download it from Microsoft’s web site.

Now, remember to use it!