Thursday, October 31, 2013

getting internet access on an a computer with two LAN connections where one doesn't have internet acccess

I was in a situation where I had two separate LANs, one for phone, one for data.  The phone LAN had no internet access.  I wanted to give the phone vendor remote access to my PC while connected to the phone LAN.

Each time I plugged my computer into the phone LAN and had the data LAN connected wirelessly, the wired connection would take preference no matter which LAN was connected first or any bridging settings I had set:













The wired connection always took priority.  I fixed this by simply giving the wired connection a static IP with the proper wired IP address but changing the default gateway on the wired connection to the default gateway on the wireless connection that had internet access.  Here's my example where 10.10.10.0 was the phone LAN without internet access and 10.0.0.0 is my data LAN with internet access:



















This allowed me internet access and allowed me visibility on the wired LAN without internet access.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Importing a Mac Address book into Excel/Outlook

If you have a Mac address book that you want to import into Outlook on the PC (or just into Excel), you need an additional tool to do it.  As of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the only options for exporting the Mac address book are vcard or Mac Address book archive, neither of which is compatible with Outlook or Excel.

There are some paid options in the Apple Store that export the address book to a TXT or CSV file, but I found a nice, easy, free option.

Export the address book VCARDs (make sure you select all and get all of your contacts in a single CSV file).  Then go here:
http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/index.php

This site takes your VCF file and will convert it to 'gmail CSV' which you can use for direct import into Outlook or import into Excel for massaging before importing into Outlook.