He’d said that he used to own it 5 years ago, but the person that hosted it forgot to register it again, and lost control… This lead to him buying the .net version. Then comes the new email…

The email was rather suspicious to me… below is the content, no names changed to protect the innocent, because in this case, I don’t believe they deserve it, after all… well, it’ll become clear..

Subject: Do you want trusoldiers.com?
From: warren.davis@dcinchq.com
Date: Sun, July 20, 2008 17:07
To: jon@netdork.net
Priority: Normal
Mailer: php

We purchase expired domains in bulk and recently acquired one that I think you might be interested in. The domain is trusoldiers.com and since you own trusoldiers.net we thought you might also want the more popular .COM version.

All of our domains are priced at a one time fee of $49.95. This includes full transfer of ownership to you and the first year of registration. After the first year is up you can renew for about $10 annually or move it to the registrar of your choice.

If you are interested go to:

http://www.dcinchq.com/index.php?domain=trusoldiers.com

If not, just hit delete. This is a one time note for the owner of trusoldiers.net.

All the best,

Warren Davis
Digital Caucus, Inc.

Now, the message clearly says “we purchase expired domain names in bulk”… That’d imply that it is expired, they purchased it, so it is no longer expired… right? Wrong… A simple test at internic.net will tell you the truth. At the time, it reported it was unregistered. That means I can use the registrar of my choice to register… This means that I don’t have to pay the extortionate $50 they were asking for… Why? Because even some of the largest registrars are only charging $10-30 a year…. Mine, eNom, only charges $9.95 a year.

The fun thing is the small print on the bottom of their website…

All domains are registered through Moniker. They can be transferred to another registrar after 60 days. Moniker charges $10.49 per year for a .COM registration. Your first year is included in the $49.95 purchase price. We will point your domain to the website of your choice at no cost or you can manage the domain yourself. We are a registered and accredited PayPal Business account holder.

They clearly say that the domain registration only costs $10.49 for a year, and can be transferred after (which will cost more)… So that leaves a tasty $39.50 profit… Not a bad little deal.

• 4 Eggs
• 1/2 cup parmesan
• 4-6 strips bacon
• Thick spaghetti
• 2 tablespoons butter

Cook the pasta until it’s al dente. Whilst the pasta is cooking, chop the bacon into small pieces. Throw the bacon into a frying pan, and cook. The pasta and bacon should be done right about the same time.

Drain the pasta, and put back in the saucepan. Remove the bacon from the frying pan. This’ll probably need to be done with a slotted spoon, or you can cheat, like I did, and use the sieve that was used to drain the pasta. Throw in the pan with the pasta.

Beat the eggs, add the parmesan, and mix. Add the butter, and egg mixture to the saucepan, and put back on medium-high heat. Stir every few minutes, making sure the egg mixture coats the pasta and bacon. It’ll be done when the egg looks like scrambled eggs, and coats all the pasta. Usually about 10 minutes or so.

I served it with some texas cheese toast, but some nice garlic bread would work too. Maybe a sprig of parsley would lighten the dish up with some color.

Technorati Tags: Food, Pasta

After talking with the building supervisor, and finding out that a fire alarm had triggered the power outage, I raced into work, and decided to take a look, and see what we could get back up, and how soon. When arriving, I find the doors won’t unlock, the building generator running, and other odd things, like flickering lights.

After gaining entrance into the building, I start to look around, and from the looks of it, we have power, but the server room isn’t coming back up. Doing some tests on the UPS, shows the UPS is okay, but won’t power up. Server room lights wouldn’t power up either, this is getting concerning.

So we tweaked with the UPS a bit, checked the breakers, called the building supervisor again, who finally decided to come in and check things out. By this time we decided to call the UPS manufacturer (Eaton), and get their support on the line to find out if we had something wrong with the UPS. This is where we find out our support contract wasn’t renewed, and it’s going to cost $288/hour, with a minimum of 4 hour charge if they sent somebody out… fun.

The building supervisor finally arrives as we’re doing diagnostics on the UPS, and is a little puzzled as to why the generator is still running. After a few more hours of playing around, finally calls TXU, they send out a repair team to take a look. We figured out the issue wasn’t UPS related when we couldn’t get half the printers in the office to come back online, and the lights were flickering in some offices.

Doing additional testing showed we were running at half the voltage we should have been on one of the legs coming into the building… That’s not a good sign… So TXU started to take a look, and it became clear pretty quickly what the cause of the problem was.

Apparently the little slithering thing had crawled up into the buildings transformer, and shorted the circuit, cooking himself in the process… I ended up getting home at about 1630… So the smallest of things can wreck a good weekend.

Technorati Tags: Snake, Work

Technorati Tags: Flash, Photography, studio

This wouldn’t be too difficult if we’d ever got around to setting up the tunnel correctly, however we never did. What I mean is that the VPN tunnel can be controller by policy. It’s a simple task of granting a group explicit remote access, and leaving the user option set to “controller by policy”. However we never deployed such policies .

This lack of policy meant that I’d have to update all user accounts, one at a time, and disabling the option in the user profile. This is okay for a few accounts, but 20+ is not so much fun. The only good thing we had was that they were all a member of the same group. This is where scripting comes into its element. The general concept of scripting is to automate a repetitive task.

Microsoft has a handy resource called the “Script Center“. They have some really cool examples, and is usually the first stopping point for me if I need to knock together a quick script. Fortunately there were several examples of exactly what I was after.

Getting the users

The first step is getting access to the users’ that are impacted. This is a simple VBS that talks to the LDAP services on an AD server. The base for my work on this portion is located in the Active Directory section, then groups, on the script center, or you can click here.

set objGroup = GetObject("LDAP://CN=VendorName,OU=Groups,DC=Domain,DC=com")
objGroup.GetInfo
 
arrMemberOf = objGroup.GetEx("member")
 
for each strMember in arrMemberOf
  wscript.echo strMember
Next

This simply loops through the group “VendorName” which is in the OU groups. The next step is to use the string returned (a full LDAP string), and remove the Dial-Up properties.

Removing the Dial-Up Preferences

Microsoft doesn’t seem to have the LDAP side of this property defined, but there are 3 values. Enabled, or true, which means the user is explicitly allowed dial-up, disabled, or false, which means they’re explicitly denied access, or unset which means group policy defines their access.

As we currently don’t have any group policies defined to grant access, the best option is to unset their dialup property. Again, the Microsoft Script Center comes through with some examples in the Active Directory, User section.

The final script ends up looking like this:

Const ADS_PROPERTY_CLEAR = 1
 
set objGroup = GetObject("LDAP://CN=VendorName,OU=Groups,DC=Domain,DC=com")
objGroup.GetInfo
 
arrMemberOf = objGroup.GetEx("member")
 
For Each strMember in arrMemberOf
 
 
  Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & strMember)
 
  objUser.PutEx ADS_PROPERTY_CLEAR, "msNPAllowDialin", 0
  objUser.SetInfo
 
  objUser = null
 
next

This loops through the list of members in the group, and unsets the msNPAllowDialin user option. A quick double check of a handful of the users shows the option is now reset back to the default of group policy controller.

Conclusion

Whilst sometimes it’s relatively easy to click few a few users to do something, there are times when a small script makes life easier. Microsoft’s Script Center has a great collection of samples, and a good jumping point for a lot of common questions. So next time a task requires you to go through and modify, or add, or even delete options, sometimes a script is just as quick.

Technorati Tags: Active Directory, Microsoft, Script, Tech, WMI, Work

The solution was working well for him for several weeks. Then he started complaining about this weird error message when he started his computer. Not really a message, but he’d get a dialog pop up on login that would prompt him to download several files:

• TASKPANE_RESTORE
• TASKPANE_HISTORY
• TASKPANE_BACKUP
• TASKPANE_SYNC
• TASKPANE_STATUS

The source of the app calling the download was the DLO client. After quizing the manager on when this started, he mentioned it was when he was trying to rearrange the task bar on Windows.

A little googling, well actually a one word search, it came up with one result to a Symantec forums article. The resolution was to register a handful of Microsoft XML DLL files…

c:
cd \windows\system32\
regsvr32 msxml.dll
regsvr32 msxml1.dll
regsvr32 msxml2.dll
regsvr32 msxml3.dll
regsvr32 msxml4.dll

The registration of msxml1 generates an error, but the rest go in fine. I rebooted, and the error was gone.

Technorati Tags: DLO, Symantec, Tech, Windows, Work

I am of course talking about eggs. And now I turn you over to Lewis Black.