moving autocomplete data on Outlook 2010

Good post on moving the Outlook 2010 autocomplete data from computer to computer:

http://benosullivan.co.uk/windows/how-to-copy-auto-complete-in-outlook-2010/

AT&T Uverse error on google - 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /cgi-bin/redirect.ha was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

One of my clients recently changed their internet service to AT&T UVerse. AT&T (in San Francisco) says they are no longer offering DSL, only UVerse. After setting up UVerse, one of my users was getting this error in Firefox when going to www.google.com:

404. That’s an error. The requested URL /cgi-bin/redirect.ha was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

She got a similar error when going to www.yahoo.com. After some research, this seemed to be a common theme in Uverse. I resolved this by clearing the cache in Firefox:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/How%20to%20clear%20the%20cache

Annoying, but easy fix. Of note - she did not have this issue on IE 9. Just Firefox 11.

removing 6to4 adapters in Windows 7

I was working on a client machine that was having trouble acessing network drives. I did an ipconfig and found 200+ network adapters. After some research, it seemed there was an issue with having multiple 6to4 network adapters and they were screwing up the machine's networking.

I followed this blog post for the automation of the removal using devcon:

http://www.ryanvictory.com/posts/automating-6to4-adapter-removal-in-windows/

The automated method took probably 3 seconds to remove each 6to4 adapter, so it wasn't fast, but it was easy.

configuring company URL for Office365 webmail

There's a lot of misinformation I've found on creating a custom URL that goes to Office365 webmail.

You can always go to:

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

But if you want to create a custom URL with your company URL, you can simply create a CNAME record that points to Outlook.com

So if your domain name was xyz.com and you'd like mail.xyz.com to go to your Office365 webmail, you'd configure a CNAME record for mail that points to outlook.com

generic Windows icons for Office apps (in this case Office 2007 on Windows 7)

I've seen this twice and fixed it the same way both times. On the user's desktop, he/she has generic Windows icons instead of the typical Word or Outlook icons in the taskbar. Here's what that looks like:

I've been able to fix it each time with a batch file I found. Since I can't attach the batch file to this post, I'll put the text of the file here, since it's short:

@echo off

cls

echo The Explorer process must be killed to delete the Icon DB.

echo Please SAVE ALL OPEN WORK FIRST

pause

taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F

echo Attempting to delete Icon DB...

If exist %userprofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db goto delID

echo Previous Icon DB not found...trying to build a new one

goto :main

:delID

cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local

del IconCache.db /a

pause

echo Icon DB successfully deleted

goto main

:main

echo Windows 7 must be restarted to rebuild the Icon DB.

echo Restart now? (Y/N):

set /p choice=

If %choice% == y goto end

echo Shutdown aborted...please close this window

explorer.exe

:end

shutdown /r /t 0

exit

SBS 2011 Backup Failure - A Volume Shadow Copy Service operation failed. Unknown error (0x800423f0)

I was configuring SBS backup on an SBS 2011 machine to a 2 TB external hard drive. But I got this error on the first backup:

SBS 2011 Backup Failures - A Volume Shadow Copy Service operation failed. Unknown error (0x800423f0)

After some quick research, I found that in some of the updates installed, there was a Sharepoint update that had downloaded, but needed to be manually installed. That's pretty lame, but whatever.

The method of updating Sharepoint properly is discussed here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/05/24/you-must-manually-run-psconfig-after-installing-sharepoint-2010-patches.aspx

In essence, it's just go to an administrative command prompt. Go to this folder:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN

and run this command:

PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

backing up a virtual machine to a local USB hard drive

A virtual machine can't natively see USB hard drives. The USB hard drives are attached to the host OS and not visible by the virtual machine. I wondered how to get a virtual machine created in Hyper-V to see a local USB drive and I found this excellent tutorial:

http://blog.ronnypot.nl/?p=721

A summary:

In the host OS, go to disk management and take the USB drive offline (right click on it and choose offline)

Shut down the virtual machine you want the USB drive to attach to.

Open the settings for that virual machine

Go to SCSI controller -> hard drive

Under phsyical hard disk, select the USB drive, which should be visible there

Now you'll be able to see the USB drive in the virtual machine and back up to it if that's what you'd like to do.