Frakkingsweet

Windows 8

Twain drivers and Windows 7/8 64-bit

Not sure if this applies to 32 bit versions of windows or not, as I only use 64-bit. I have tons of ram and 32-bit doesn't handle it (max of 4 gig and you will only be able to use 3 gig due to memory addressing issues). Anyways.

C-Sharp

WCF and external .config file

Hi all, it's been awhile. I've been pretty busy. Anyways, I just had a requirement, due to limitations of the software I'm working with, to load WCF configuration I had to do it from a file other than the web.config. I started out

Linux

ZFS, 3ware 9650 and performance

Hey everyone, here's the plan, migrate all of my VM's to a data store on my NFS server, I've been wanting to do this for a while, to get off of the dedicated local storage, and move to shared. Big benefits of doing so,

Windows 8

Windows 8 and Star Trek Armada 2

I know Star Trek Armada 2 is a really old game, from 95/98/ME days, but I've had a hankering for playing it.

Operations

WCF with HTTP and HTTPS

OK, this is really, really annoying. You should NOT have to do any config to support the 2 most widely used protocols on the internet, HTTP and HTTPS. Here's the simple, really simple, web.config to support both HTTP and HTTPS. You don't need all the

Operations

Multiple Config Transforms on Single Element

Hey everyone, so, I had a need to set some attributes and remove 2 of them in my web.config transform file. On my development system, I have my WCF services all pointing to my local fiddler, for debugging? Anyways, I needed to remove the proxyAddress attribute and also set

C-Sharp

EntityFramework, slow insert and SqlBulkCopy

Hey all, I finally got fed up with the ridiculously slow insert times of EntityFramework. So, I went with the SqlBulkCopy route, but that required a second connection to the database, and second connection string in the config file, you're not storing them in the code right...? Well,

C-Sharp

Converting non MVC3 projects to MVC3 projects

Well, I needed to do this because the project that the codgen tool in Orchard creates is not an MVC3 project. Call me picky, but I like the Add Control, Goto View, Create View, and all the other cool little things that come with an MVC project in Visual Studio.

C-Sharp

iTextSharp and Windows SSL Certificates

Well, it took a bit of work, but I figured out how to add certificates and intermediate certificates into a PDF document while signing it using iTextSharp. The examples they had were close, but not quite there. They had hard coded the buffer size to 4000. Seemed a bit small,

Windows XP

Unable to move/drag icons on desktop in Windows XP

I had a weird issue today where we could drag drop stuff from places like Outlook, Explorer, Internet Explorer, to other Explorer windows. But you could not drag them to the desktop. It would give you a circle with a line saying no, you can't do that. You

ESX

vSphere 4.1 / vpxd service not starting

Good day all, we upgraded our vCenter server from 2008 to 2008r2. Yay. (2008 bad, r2 good). Once we did this, we ran into a problem where the vCenter services weren't starting. Searching the net revealed nothing. Our guess was that the sql server was not all the

PowerShell

Updating com+ component username/password in PowerShell

Here's a little PowerShell script that will update the username and password on a com+ component. Useful when domain accounts are used as identities on com+ objects on a bunch of systems and you need to change the username and password. write-host Starting $catalog = New-Object -comobject COMAdmin.COMAdminCatalog

Operations

HP Universal Print Driver Alternative

Well, this was an annoying issue. I pushed out TCP/IP printers using group policy and pointed them to printers on a print server to pull the drivers and settings. This worked awesome, except for the 45 seconds per printer overhead. I narrowed it down to the universal print driver,

ESX

Unable to create VMFS partition

Well, ran into an issue where we couldn't create a datastore on our freshly set up array. A lot of people said the solution was to install windows and format the disks with NTFS. While that might work, I didn't want to do that. You have

Operations

Group policy extensions and shortcuts

Well, here's the task, create a shortcut that would apply to certain people using group policy extension that point to a file or executable on a mapped drive...trickier than it sounds. Here's the reason it doesn't work and a workaround. When creating a

Mac

Outlook 2011 on the Mac and Exchange 2007+

Had an issue today where the Outlook client on a mac out on the internet would not connect to our exchange server. Turns out that Outlook 2011 requires access to the EWS web services, and probably all other Outlook Anywhere services. We had disabled Outlook Anywhere from the outside, because

Operations

DNS Intermittently not resolving domains

We've run into a problem where some domains would stop resolving from Windows DNS. They would work fine for about a week, then they would stop. I couldn't find anything on the internet, and MS's support people had me try changing the CacheLocking stuff

Operations

Nested group file permissions not taking effect

Alright, here was my problem. I have a 2008r2 file server, tons of files, and we are removing everyone's full access rights and doing 3 groups for each root folder, a full control, modify and read only. We ran into a problem where if you put a user

Operations

RSA Agent Access Denied/Time outs with NLB

RSA agent on servers getting access denied and network timeout problems when the server is using NLB. Authentication Failures during test.While installing some RSA agents on NLB systems I ran into a problem where only one of the nodes would succesfully test the authentication. I started thinking, ok, maybe

Operations

Server manager not displaying roles/features

There was an event log error entry every time I tried in the Application event log. It was: Faulting application name: TrustedInstaller.exe, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc4b0 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5be02b Exception code: 0xc00000fd Fault offset: 0x00000000000529f0

TMG

TMG cannot handle your request because the DNS quota was exceeded

Just yesterday I started to get this error message Error Code: 500 Internal Server Error. Forefront TMG cannot handle your request because the DNS quota was exceeded. Contact your Forefront TMG administrator. (12218) while browsing the internet. I could not find any information on this message at Microsoft or anywhere

Exchange 2010

Changing SMTP 220 Header in Exchange 2010

OK, problem, the exchange 2010 server was spewing out the internal server name in the header of a SMTP connection 220 internal.domain.local Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service ready at Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:23:18 -0400. Needless to say, that's bad. I wanted it to show

Linux

"no network provider accepted the given network path"

I ran into a problem where I had one 2003r2 server that couldn't access the Linux samba servers but it could access the other windows server with no problems. I was using share level security in the smb.conf file. This worked fine up until about a month

C-Sharp

Bitmask without and's and or's

Well, ran into an issue with a programming language that didn't support and's and or's.  Turns out we really didn't need to do it, but I wanted to figure how to do it. So, I did. Here's the c# code

Rants

Samsung BD-P3600 and firmware

Last night I got tired of the notifications that I kept getting about new firmware, so I decided to do the update. I was all excited to start watching true blood season 2. But no, the updated firmware wouldn't even get to the menu. So, I set out