This could be done easier, I thought. And so thought many before me.

This is a slight modification of the script by Chris Dent, because I needed different results to link site name (which IISWebServerSetting saves as ServerComment) to the specific logfile directory (which is a mishmash of LogFileDirectory and Name).

Function Get-IISLogSetting {
    param(
       [String[]]$Servers = $Env:Computername
    );

    $Servers | %{
        $Server = $_ ;
        Write-Progress "Scaning" $Server;
        $WMI = New-Object Management.ManagementScope("\\$Server\root\MicrosoftIISv2");
        $WMI.Options.Authentication = "PacketPrivacy";
        $Query = New-Object Management.ObjectQuery("SELECT Name, ServerComment, LogFileDirectory, LogFileTruncateSize, LogType, LogFilePeriod FROM IIsWebServerSetting");
        $Searcher = New-Object Management.ManagementObjectSearcher($WMI, $Query);
        Trap [UnauthorizedAccessException] {
              Write-Error "$($Server): Unable to connect or Access is denied";
              continue;
        }
        $result = $Searcher.Get();
        #$Host.EnterNestedPrompt();
        $result | Select-Object @{
            n = 'Server';
            e = { $Server; }
        }, @{
            n = 'Website';
            e = { $_.ServerComment; }
        }, @{
            n = 'Log Path';
            e = { "{0}\{1}" -f $_.LogFileDirectory, $_.Name.Replace("/",""); }
        }
    }
}

Usage:

Get-IISLogSetting [-servers server1,server2,server3,...]

I also shy away from automatic payments, and believe that to be in charge of your budget, you cannot have utility companies snipping away from your account on any random date, certainly if you only have a promise or not even a vague clue on how much that snipping would be.

But this requires a good filing system.

Scanning

Anyway. The daily cycle is that my wife empties the snail mailbox and dumps envelopes on my desk. I open every envelope, decide if its scan-worthy (invoices, obviously, but sometimes even normal letters. But anything official is a good reason to scan it), place it on the document feeder of the ugly MFC I have in a corner and forget about it.

Archiving

What I should do then (but procrastinate, and you shouldn’t) is fire up Adobe Acrobat and scan the papers in the document feeder double-sided at 150dpi and OCR them. Then, I catalogue each document.

I use Adobe Acrobat because it supports network scanners and can OCR documents. Scanning with Apple’s Preview gave me documents of 3 MB a page, while Acrobat spits out files of 300kb. And contents of the latter is searchable through Spotlight. Imagine trying to find an invoice based on how much I paid someone. I can.

As you can see, I have developed a basic folder structure which I replicate for every fiscal year. The “clients” and “suppliers” are the busiest folders, and I save each scanned document in the format “YYYYMMDD <client/supplier name> <Document number>”.pdf.

Finder automatically arranges files by name, so the files are ordered from january to december. If I need to find invoices of a certain supplier, I just search them using Spotlight. Same goes for invoice numbers.

I use the colored labels within the context menu of Finder to make clear which documents are paid (=green), not paid (= no color) or documents with issues (contested invoices, etc, in red).

Paying

Of course, be mindful of paying your invoices. This you can do on a weekly basis, just go through the documents which do not have a color and pay them. Or not.

The Accountant

He still likes paper versions of all my documents, so he gets the stack that builds up every month at the paper tray of the scanner.

What I cannot forget is print out my invoices. Sometimes, I’m not around my printer to do so, so I created a folder “to print” on my desktop where I drag files which I have filed and need to print for my accountant. This is something which is particularly important with suppliers and yourself if you are sending out electronic invoices.

E-invoicing

Honestly, I love sending PDF’s to my clients. Saves me a trip to the mailbox, buying stamps, … But I have found for myself that receiving electronic invoices can be a pain in the neck.

First of all, you risk like me to forget to print out these electronic invoices. So that means sending them by email to my accountant afterwards. Worse is if I forget to file them after receiving an email with an electronic invoice. Next time you will hear about it is through a (hopefully) paper reminder. I try to scan these reminders too if I don’t pay them right away, since history has proven that even these paper reminders can disappear into the void and my subconscious self.

It turned out that I was quite bad at filing these electronic invoices. The Shell e-invoicing I can handle because they come in batches and are easily downloaded and printed. You can perfectly forget about them for 3 months and then start filing away. But Belgian banks are nowadays offering e-invoicing through Zoomit, which in hindsight is a terror to use. You do get an email when you get a new document, but since the document is behind a pin-code you never bother filing the invoice after receiving the mail. At home you forget about it, and when you do remember, you notice you cannot download all unfiled invoices in a batch. And if you then manage to download them, you’ll notice the PDF’s are protected, so you cannot even copy the invoice number to use in your filing system.

Since then, I’ve cancelled all my e-invoicing. I need to have my invoices on paper anyways for my accountant, so why should I worry about printing my invoices, or having to pay reminder costs because an invoice was left open in Zoomit?

With that in mind, I might even start invoicing clients again by paper invoices.

For years now, I have had a Kenwood TK-3101 mobile radio which is tuned in to PMR446 frequencies. PMR446 is in Europe a way to use radio communication without the need for a license. If the weather is not to crazy and you are in the open, you should be able to receive PMR46-transmissions from up to 5 kilometer away.

I did not have much use for the radio until I started motorcycling. Riding along, PMR’s distance of a few kilometer apart is more interesting than the few meters you get out of bluetooth of the few dozens of meters out of a wireless helmet kit. Nice to talk to the person behind you on the buddy seat, but not enough to talk to a fellow rider riding in front or behind you.

My brother started riding too and I bought/won a few Kenwood TK-3101′s from eBay, intended to using them while riding. I also bought an aftermarket USB serial cable which the seller claimed would work with TK-3101′s.

Now, everyone on the internet claims 2 things:

• You need a slow machine to run KPG48D or KPG54D, since newer, faster machines are too quick for the radio to respond in the same speed the software on your fast computer is expecting data;
• KPG48D and KPG54D, both native DOS applications, need a pure connection to the serial COM port. USB won’t cut it.

Well, it turns out the above is only partial true.

VMWare Fusion, Windows XP

For starters, I needed something that could understand DOS. I had already VMWare Fusion installed, and set up a 32bit Windows XP Professional installation. Both come right out of the box, so you don’t have to modify anything here.

Serial Adapter

The USB to serial adapter I have turns out to be the popular Prolific PL-2030 USB to serial adapter, but in my case it ends in a mini- and microjack connector for Kenwood. Install the driver on the virtual Windows XP, connect the USB cable to your Mac and VMWare Fusion asks you to which machine it should connect the USB adapter. The obvious choice for us is the virtualized Windows XP.

The Kenwood software KPG48D and KPG54D only know of COM1 and COM2 so you need to make sure your USB serial adapter impersonates one of these two ports. Dive into the Windows XP Device Manager to disable one of two COM ports, and set the COM port your USB adapter impersonates to the COM port you just disabled.

The Prolific port will be set at 9500 bps, and this will work.

Installing DOSBox

After that, install DOXBox. It is a DOS emulator, which looks just like your regular DOS window, but it isn’t. For starters, it allows you to slow any program ran in it down on the go.

After installation, you should look in your Start menu to change the Options of DOSBox. This link will open the configuration file of DOSBox. Scroll down to [serial] and make sure that the COM-port you are going to use is set to ‘direct’.

In my case, I was using COM2 so modified the following line:

serial2=directserial realport:COM2

This instructs DOSBox to let any communication from or to the COM2 port in the DOSBox emulator straight to the COM2 port of Windows XP, which in our case is through a virtualized and physical USB port.

Making it all work

Right. Your virtual machine is in place, your COM-port defined and DOSBox installed.

Make sure you have the KPG54D and KPG48D software set up on a easy to reach folder on your Windows XP virtual machine, preferably something like C:\KENWOOD. The reason is that when you start DOSBox, it does not know anything about your C:-drive. You need to mount the directory you wish to use to the emulated C:-drive in the emulator.

mount c: c:\kenwood

Once you have done this, DOSBox will tell you drive C is mounted to the specified directory. Change to the C: drive and start up KPG54D.

KPG54D will show up. Use the Alt key to activate the menu, and use the arrow keys to navigate to Setup where you make sure you have selected the right COM port.

Now we can slow down the emulated version of DOS. Type in Ctrl+F11 to decrease and Ctrl+F12 to increase the Cpu speed cycles which are displayed in the Title bar of DOSBox. Once you reach about 190 cycles, you can navigate to the Program menu, hook up your Kenwood TK-3101, turn it on and read all channel information from your radio.

UPDATED: Even at 3000 cycles, I managed to read all data.

Troubleshooting

If for some reason you still get read errors, try to change the CPU cycles or COM port settings in Windows. It should work out of the box at 9500 bps and 3000 cpu cycles, but sometimes you need to power cycle the transceiver and change the speed of COM port or emulated DOS box to get it to work.

Thoughts

It’s probably possible to skip VMWare Fusion and Windows XP with the OSX version of DOSBox, but I will still have to look into that. At least I found a way that allows me to use 1999 technology with 2011 fastest consumer hardware.

“Improvements in Windows Explorer”

Mac OSX 10.7 “Lion” Finder:

By default SharePoint 2007 automatically configures the access requests for a particular site to go to the person who created the site. This is not always what you want and you may find yourself receiving  “Access request for a site” emails for sites you setup, but don’t actually manage. You can change this by doing the following:

1. Navigate to the site in question
2. Navigate to People and Groups > Site Permissions > Settings > Access Requests

Change the Send all requests for access to the following e-mail address: to the proper address.

Get VCenter 4.1
Get SQL Server 2008 x64
Get SQL Server 2008 x64 native client from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=C6C3E9EF-BA29-4A43-8D69-A2BED18FE73C&displaylang=en
Set up X64 c:\windows\system32\odbcad32.exe system dsn

1. Install Windows Server 2008 x64  - not R2, which is not supported yet;
2. Install SQL Server 2008 R2 x64 on a Windows Server 2008 R2;
3. Create a database for VMWare on this SQL Server, and modify the rights and logins accordingly;
4. Get the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 x64 Native Client from Microsoft and install it on the machine you want to install VCenter on;
5. Set up X64 c:\windows\system32\odbcad32.exe system dsn pointing to the created database;
6. Start SQL Agent service on SQL Server;
7. Install VCenter 4.1

If you check the Eventlog, do you find these events?

The MAPI call ‘OpenMsgStore’ failed with the following error:
The information store could not be opened.
The MAPI provider failed.
MAPI 1.0
ID no: 8004011d-0289-00000000

For more information, click http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

Failed to open mailbox ‘/o=CONTOSO/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=JohnDoe’ in mailbox store ‘/o=CONTOSO/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=ContosoMailServer/cn=Microsoft Private MDB81234567′ on server ‘ContosoMailServer’.
Error: The information store could not be opened.
The MAPI provider failed.
MAPI 1.0
ID no: 8004011d-0289-00000000

For more information, click http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

Quickly check if these users are not disabled.  Mailboxes with disabled users as associated account cannot be moved.  The workarounds are to enable the user accounts – which is not that desireable for your company’s Security staff – or assign SELF as the associated account.

More info at Microsoft.

• Go into the Exchange 2007 Management Console (or Shell)
• Find the mailbox in the Recipient Configuration
• Write down the server the mailbox is stored
• Disconnect the mailbox from the original AD user
• Get a list of disconnected mailboxes on the server you wrote down

Only to find that the mailbox is not listed. Panic!

Did you forget to check the Deletion Settings on the mailbox store? No, on second glance they are the default 30 days, so the disconnected mailbox should still be available.

But, wait… On Exchange 2003, didn’t you run the Cleanup Agent to find disconnected mailboxes?

No such a thing in Exchange 2007, or is there?

Yes there is.  Clean-Mailboxdatabase is your cmdlet and friend.  Run Clean-Mailboxdatabase <databasename> in an Exchange Management Shell and reload your list of disconnected mailboxes.

You saved the day!  Or at least Exchange saved your job ;).

So next time:

1. Get-Mailbox john@contoso.com | Format-Table Name, Database
2. Disable-Mailbox john@contoso.com
3. Clean-MailboxDatabase “Mailbox Server\Mailbox Database Storagegroup Name”
4. Connect-Mailbox -Database “Mailbox Database” -Identity “John Peoples”   -User john@fabrikam.com

I’ve been trying Kodiak now for a few hours on OS X and although it looks pretty and helps me visualize my test environment running on VMware Server 2, I am still unable to use the console.  Kodiak’s documentation is sparse, which is not helped by it’s current apply-and-you-might-ever-get-allowed-to-the-beta program.  But I hear positive comments when running it on Windows, so if you want to try Kodiak out, don’t wait and head over to their website to register yourself into the beta program.

BlueBear Kodiak 0.0.3 screenshot

One small reminder: if you want to connect to your VMware host (let it be ESX, ESXi or VMware Server 2), make sure you use the same server address as you currently use in your VMware Infrastructure Client: servername-or-ip:portnumber.  It saves you the humiliation of running into error #2032, which actually means that AIR and Kodiak is not able to connect to your VMware environment.

And I want my console to work!

Update: Bluebear came out with 0.0.4 of their Kodiak management software, with some SSL modifications that would make working with self signed certificates much easier.

I did in 2007, and never really thought of it until I ran into the following article 1006764 on the VMWare knowledge base.

The cause is very simple, and so is the solution: Member servers and clients have, just like users, accounts with passwords. If set up like this, these passwords are reset every set period. If you revert a machine back to an old snapshot, chances are that the password stored in the snapshot is not up to date with the password stored in Active Directory, and hence, Active Directory does not allow the machine to log on again.

Ever run into a problem where you revert a domain member server or Windows XP domain client toa previously taken snapshot, and when trying to log on the domain, the logon fails?

I did in 2007, and never really thought of it until I ran into the following article on the VMWare knowledge base: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=1006764&sliceId=1

The cause is very simple, and so is the solution: Member servers and clients have, just like users, accounts with passwords. If set up like this, these passwords are reset every set period. If you revert a machine back to an old snapshot, chances are that the password stored in the snapshot is not up to date with the password stored in Active Directory, and hence, Active Directory does not allow the machine to log on again.