average admins

I’m puzzled, perplexed, and bewildered.  This isn’t anything out of the ordinary, except I’m pretty good at finding why a computer is running an unwanted program most of the time.  When I boot in to WinXP there is a very miniscule window frame at the top left of my screen.  Most of it is off the screen, just the bottom corner of the window shows.  I can drag it out to my desktop and see that it is a very, very small program window.  I started going through the process list in task manager when I noticed an iexplore.exe running when I didn’t have an IE window open. I killed the process and the window went away, but it comes back at the next log in.  I have reinstalled IE to try and fix, but it won’t go away.  Do any of you have any suggestions or knowledge of Malware that would do this.  I tried to Google it, but you could only guess how many near misses came up in the search listing. 

This is a nice little YouTube video that caught me odd, on how to charge your Ipod. Hopefully, it hasn’t been posted here before. Anyway, check it out here.

Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Well, the upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard went smoothly, as Wooley predicted in his comment on my previous post.

The whole upgrade took about an hour and 15 minutes (which included verifying the install DVD) on my MacBook. I now am running the latest and greatest version of Apple’s OS, a certified flavor of UNIX, and am, so far, extremely impressed. The dock is beautiful, Stacks look extremely useful and efficient, there are a lot of desktop customizable features, Spaces (which I am looking forward to setting up soon), and more.

I look forward to getting a bit more intimate better acquainted with Leopard in the upcoming days and months. Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly. If you’re scared, don’t be. Mine was a breeze! I just wish I had upgraded the day this package arrived on my doorstep…

uname Output:

% uname -a
Darwin xbook 9.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0: Tue Oct 9 21:35:55 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Until next time…

Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I have had Apple’s latest release of Mac OS X, Leopard, since it launched a couple of weeks ago. I used my in-store credit from my iPhone purchase reimbursement from when I purchased my iPhone 45 days too early for the price drop… or something… Anyway, I got Leopard and tonight I’m gonna install it!

Backups are running as we speak… I’m jonesing as we speak… I’m ready to install this new OS!!!! I’ll let you know how it goes…

Until next time…

Ok, after a month or so of technical difficulties, lack of article posting, and personal stuff and business, I’m making a comeback to the average admins. The site has been completely fragged and reinstalled with a fresh copy of the latest WordPress release, version 2.3.

You can post comments once again. I mean, actually you. Not just the SPAM bots any more…

The site will be themed again real soon, probably over the weekend. Until then, enjoy the default WP theme. After I make sure everything is working as expected I will start pushing some plugins back into the mix.

So, if any of my contributors are still out there, please feel free to hate on me for the downtime and get to positing!

Until next time…

I moved the average admins site to a new host today… I should have a lot more control over the site and more bandwidth to boot.

If you had an @averageadmins.com email address before and would like to have it still, please leave a comment and I will get it back on there for you.

Some things may not work like they did before. I took down the original AA blog so some links to the old blog may be broken.

Until next time…

So, today starts a new month, and with this new month comes a fresh slate of bandwidth to be sucked down across the Internet for no apparent reason. Our bandwidth usage for the past 2-3 months has been horrendous. Chris and I have looked through the logs in months past and all of the traffic appears to be legitimate. So, being that this is a self funded project, paid for by myself, I guess it will continue. New hosting with more transfer limits would be nice, but it probably isn’t going to happen and I hate that.

average admins has been what seems to be a great resource since November’ish 2005. We have had some great topics on here as well as some interesting questions and responses. Maybe the tides will change for the bandwidth bandits and they will start sucking down some other site with “suck worthy” content (no pun intended). So, if this month is anything like last month, enjoy the average admins site until around the 9th or 10th of the month… Then, it will more than likely be offline again due to bandwidth limit exceeded… I wish I could theme that error message so that it would at least have our look and feel…

Until next time…

Ok, I’m doing some research for entry level gateway firwalls.  I’m looking at the SonicWall Pro 1260 w/ Enhanced OS and the Cisco ASA 5505 Security Plus Bundle.  Both have VPN, SSL peers, DMZ, and firewall capabilities.  I know that the number of ports don’t come close on the two, but I’m going to be pluggnig two Linksys switches uploaded to them that all 25 of my workstations link to.  Since I’m a little of a green horn at this security end of IT, what are your thoughts?

I use the MMC for various system management jobs but I’ve never thought about blogging about it. It’s just one of those things that I’ve never given a second thought.

Rob, from confessions of a freeware junkie, posted about how he has his setup. I have to say, his looks a lot more useful that the one I created.

http://maximillianx.blogspot.com/…-extending-power-of-your-management.html

One thing I do differently than Rob is that I launch the entire MMC with my domain admin credentials. This is what the Target: field of my shortcut looks like:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\runas.exe /user:domain\my-admin-acct “mmc C:\Chris\Microsoft Management Consoles\Domain Management.msc”

Note: If you want to save your password so you don’t have to type it in every time you launch the MMC add /savecred right after /user:domain\my-admin-acct.

Also, in order to add Active Directory Users and Computers, you’ll need the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…

While you’re at his site, take a look around. I monitor his RSS feed on Bloglines and he’s always posting cool stuff.

Those of you that know me know that I have a huge music fetish. I LOVE listening to new (previously unheard by me) stuff.

With that in mind, I’ve recently ran across some new stuff which I want to share with you.

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