René's ICT Notepad

Yesterday and today, I spent quite some time on a client that in the past logged in to a NetWare NDS environment and that should be changed to no longer log into NDS but to Active Directory instead. In itself not quite a difficult job: remove the Novell Client32, install Client for Microsoft Networks and that should be it. This is true, just to a certain level, I discovered... Spent really quite some time trying to find out why Group Policies were not applied and software was not distributed. Event IDs 1030 and 1058 were logged at the client site, indicating that some part of the SYSVOL-folder on the DC could not be read. First, I learned that there is a hotfix for that as mentioned in Microsoft KBA 810907 , but after applying that one my problem remained. Further googling brought me to Microsoft KBA 314494 and that one did the trick. What had happened? As I said, this client used to login to an NDS-environment using Client32. Client32 has lots of performance issues, especially in mul

We all know that certain Outlook-versions tend to send a file WINMAIL.DAT along with the e-mail message, and that this DAT-file contains a formatted version of the e-mail itself. We also know that this is caused by a setting telling Outlook whether or not to use RTF for sending mail (see Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article 138053 for more). To this point, nothing new... But, what I always thought was that the WINMAIL.DAT file only contained a formatted version of the e-mail, and only that. What I did not know was that WINMAIL.DAT could also contain attachments that were sent in the original e-mail. Question is: how to extract attachments contained within the DAT-file? I googled for that and came up with an interesting (command-line) utility called WMDecode . WMDecode runs in a folder and extracts attachments from files that you drop in the same folder. Very handy!!

For those of you that really would like to get updated on every item and every burp that I produce ;-) I have added an Atom RSS Feed today. In the sidebar on the right, right next to the Blogger logo, there is the Atom logo with a shortcut to the feed's link. Have fun with that... I have to admit that I am not really into RSS, I just checked it out yesterday (after receiving a request for that from Ron Onrust (see a post on Ron somewhere in the very first posts in my ICT-blog )). Today I downloaded my first RSS Reader, SharpReader, and I have to get into RSS'ing a little more. Anyway, have fun...

PSTray (see post below) is absolutely a nice tool (to hide icons from the system tray that you do not want there), but I have to admit that I overlooked Windows XP's own feature to do exactly that... ;-)=( I always thought that "hide unused icons from the system tray" (as the feature is called in WinXP) made decisions on whether or not to show a certain icon, based on Windows' own logic. A collegue of mine attended me to the fact that there is a "Customize..." button there, to exactly do what PSTray also does: explicitly tell icons to be there or not, and as such have absolute control over the icons that you do (not) want to appear. OK, oversight on my part, but you're never too old to learn (as we say in Holland)...

When looking at Steve Miller's site (see post below, about ShareWatch), I got the idea that putting an idea on Steve's wishlist might not be such a good idea (he is too busy working on new and other projects, so there's practically no time left for updating the existing modules). So I forgot about that. Instead, I found a tool that enables you to control the system tray, to hide icons that you do not want to see etc. PSTray is what it's called and I have started to evaluate it today...

ShareWatch allows you to see who is connected to a computer and what files they are accessing. Have you ever wondered why your hard drive or modem is active, but you aren't doing anything to cause it to be active? It is possible a remote user is accessing your computer. Have you ever had a file locked but you don't know why? ShareWatch can tell you if a network user is using the file and allows you to disconnect them so that you can edit/delete the file. Have you ever wanted to shutdown a computer, but don't want to drop people using the computer. ShareWatch will show you all resources in use by remote users. PS: More nifty tools by Steve Miller on his homepage at http://www.stevemiller.net/apps . I found Steve's pages when looking for a tool that would allow me to assign a _global_ hotkey in Windows for using PasteSpecial. PasteSpecial is a very very handy option and depending on the application I use it a lot, but unfortunately it has no default hotkey assigned (