Outlook Opens and then uses 100% CPU

(I'm posting this because I just took 3 hours of my life finding the solution.)

On two computers...Outlook would start, but then peg the processor to 100% (50% on the dual core machine). After a few minutes, the processor usage would go down...but if I tried to use the menus it would go back up to 100%. I was able to start Outlook in Safe Mode, but that didn't help since we need a few Outlook Add-ins. I tried repairing office, reinstalling office and uninstalling anything I could think of that might interfere (iTunes, Skype, Symantec Antivirus, Adobe Acrobat) but nothing worked.

I decided to look at the Outlook Command Line Reference and noticed the "/nocustomize" option; "Starts Outlook without loading outcmd.dat (customized toolbars) and *.fav file." With that option, Outlook started and worked fine (with my add-ins loaded). I closed Outlook, searched my computer for outcmd.dat, deleted the two copies it found, started Outlook. The two users that were having the issue are now back working, and I am a happy man!

Scalix - Forwarding

When we started using Scalix as our email server, one of the things that frustrated me was forwarding of emails. When an employee leaves, we want to keep their mailbox intact and grant access to their manager. For new emails, we want them forwarded to either their manager or another employee in their department. If you setup the forwarding via the Out of Office Interface or Rules Wizard...it will forward the emails, but the emails we be added as an attachment. This adds an extra step for the person received the emails, since they need to open the email and then the attachment. To get around this, you can use the sxaa command line utility.

sxaa --user "User Name" --redirect "email@domain.com"

You can also use the "--retain" option to keep a copy of the message in the Inbox (we don't use this)

sxaa --user "User Name" --redirect "email@domain.com" --retain

More details about sxaa can be found by typing "man sxaa" from the command line or here.

Backups

- Do backups
- Test your backups
- Test your backups again.

Don't be an idiot.

Internet Speed Tests

When I travel, I am always curious what kind of speeds I am going to get on my current connection. Here are a few of the sites that I use most often:

http://www.speedtest.net/
http://speedtest.frontiernet.net/
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Sprint Airave (Rocks!)

In my area there is decent service from AT&T, Sprint & Verizon...but none of them work very well in my neighborhood. I had been intrigued by T-Mobile's Wifi offering, but there service in my area is so bad...that I wouldn't be able to use my phone around town.

I have been hoping and praying that Sprint would release the Airave for the past year. It is a femtocell device from Samsung that acts as a mini cell tower and routes your calls through your broadband connection. It allows any Sprint phone to work using the device and only costs $5/month extra on each phone that uses it (much cheaper than a landline) Currently, it is only available from Sprint stores (no online purchases, whaaat?). None of the stores within 50 miles of me had them in stock, so I purchased mine from eBay.

It picked it up from the Post Office yesterday and began setting it up as soon I got home. I took it out of the box, plugged a cat5 cable from the Airave to my Linksys router, plugged in the power and plugged in the external GPS antenna. Called Airave tech support to activate the device. They picked up in about 10 seconds and were very friendly. They took my MAC address and activated the device telling me it often takes over an hour for the device to come online. They also warned that is sometimes has problems with VoIP phones behind the same router...I was a bit worried because I use a SIP phone (CallWithUs) for my landline. I turned on the device and after no more than 5 minutes, all the lights (power, system, gps & wan) on the device had gone blue. I looked down at my phone...where I normally had 1 bar (on a good day) I had full service. Placed a test call to my wife in the next room and we could hear each other perfectly. Plugged my SIP phone back and made a test call to the wife's cell phone, great quality and no conflicts.

I will post again soon with more impressions, but so far so good! Nice job Sprint!
(I apologize if I sound like a Sprint fanboy, but I'm so happy I can finally use my cell phone in my house)

Samba Recycle Bin - AutoDelete Old Files

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have setup the Recycle Bin functionality on my Samba server. Rather than letting the Recycle Bin folder fill up over time, I wanted to have it delete files older than one week once per day. To do so, I added this line to my crontab:

0 15 * * * /usr/bin/find /samba/phoenix/.recyclebin -mtime +7 -print -type f -delete

Files older than 7 days are now deleted automatically everyday at 12:15AM.

Samba Recycle Bin

Easy to setup, and helps provide an added layer of protection. I added the bold text to my smb.conf, restarted samba...and voila!

[share]
path = /samba/share
read only = No
valid users = @DomainUsers
create mask = 0770
directory mask = 0770

vfs objects = recycle
recycle:repository = .recyclebin/%U
recycle:keeptree = Yes
recycle:touch = Yes
recycle:touch_mtime = Yes
recycle:versions = Yes
recycle:maxsize = 0
recycle:exclude = *.tmp

Free Reservationless Conferencing Calls

My Company is doing a trial of www.freeconferencecall.com. They provide free conference services of up to 96 participants per call. There is a full list of features here. Since many of our home office employees have unlimited phone plans (i.e. no long-distance charges), I think this will work well. If we need a toll-free call-in number, the pricing is $0.06/minute/user...still very fair. They even include free recording...on our current service, we pay a flat rate of $15 for any recording (same rate if it is a 2 minutes or 2 hours). Will post again soon with the results of our trial!

Windows Explorer: Show Drive Letters First

This really should be the default setting, I have this changed on all my computers. Even with only a few network drives, I find this much more user friendly. Just a quick registry edit:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/showdrivelettersfirst.htm

Display Warning before login for Windows XP

For a security audit, my company was required to display a warning to all users before they are log on to windows. Here are the items we added to the registry to make it possible:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"legalnoticecaption"="Notice"
"legalnoticetext"="Use of this system is limited to authorized individuals. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. The administrators of this system reserve the right to monitor its use as necessary to ensure its stability, availability, and security."

Here is a link to the MS Knowlegebase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/101063

Samba Printer Setup

Finally added our office printers to our samba server. This guide was very helpful:

http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/network_administration_guides/samba_reference_guide/29_CUPS-printing_105.html

My one problem was when adding the drivers. I kept receiving the error message: "WERR_ACCESS_DENIED". In the process of looking at many configurations and setup guides, I had set my smb.conf incorrectly. After lots of digging, I found that I had incorrectly set this parameter: "use client driver = yes". In my scenario, it should be "use client driver = no".

Scalix 11.4.2

Not a lot of new functionality, but a bunch of bug fixes. New features for this release:

* Support for OpenSuSE 10.2 is replaced with support for OpenSuSE 11.0 on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.
* Support for Lightning/Sunbird with initial support for Lightning 0.9 (although I have had issues with this, a bug has been logged)
* Delegated Administration will allow you to delegate certain managament task to other users.

Release notes and full list of big fixes:
http://downloads.scalix.com/.community/11.4.2/RELEASE_NOTES.html

Blackberry Activesync Clients

Blackberry users who have an email systems not supported by RIM have either had to run the clunky NotifyLink software or use a cable sync. (ugh!) There are two new exciting products coming to market in the very near future:

AstraSync - http://www.astrasync.com/

Beta was recently released. There is a public forum available, and while there are people with issues...it appears there are many happy users. Unfortunately, the currently only support Exchange 2007. (with support for '03 coming soon)

NotifySync- http://notifysync.notify.net/Portal.asp

NotifySync is still in beta, but they appear to have much broader server support. They currently claim support Exchange 03 & 07, Communigate, Kerio, Zimbra. And while not explicitly mentioned, Zarafa & Scalix should work too.

Scalix 11.4

Scalix 11.4 was released in late May and it looking more and more like an enterprise-ready product. Although currently in beta, they will have activesync support in June. Adding that to their NotifyLink offering gives some good options for mobile devices.

Other good updates include...

More stable Outlook client
Better CalDAV support
Overlaid calendars in webmail

I'm also very happy they decided to certify CentOS 4 & 5, giving full support for both...it is about time some vendors did this!

Check it out: http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10789