I've moved my Blog to MusingSysAdmin.com

Hey there,

Decided that I'd actually register my own domain and move the blog, so it's new home is MusingSysAdmin.com where I will be posting all new content.
Come drop by for a visit.

Thanks,
Steve

Unable to open links in Outlook

So I had a user encounter the following error after they downgraded to Office 2007 from 2010 and tried to open links within emails...

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.

Looks to be an issue with the Default Program settings for opening internet links, so Outlook doesn't know what to do with it.

The resolution is in kb 310049 from Microsoft.  Click on the FixMe button for the appropriate OS and after a quick reboot you're back in business, or if you're into fixing it manually the instructions are there as well.

Steve

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The Geek on Vacation with an Android Mini PC

You can take the Geek out of his element, but you can't take the geek out of the Geek.

So I'm taking a camping trip with the family in our travel trailer(can you really call it camping if your trailer has a 42" TV?), and we need to bring along our Movie, TV and Music selections as there is a slight lack of reception.

So a while back I asked my wife for a Uhost2  made by Smallart for my birthday.  It is basically a Android mini computer that connects via HDMI to a TV.  It provides a number of possibilities, including being used as a Media Centre which is why I wanted one.

The conversation kinda went like...

Wife:  What exactly does it do?

Me:  Well, you hook it up to your TV and you can watch Movies and TV on it and can listen to music among other things.

Wife:  So, it does the same thing as the Apple TV I bought you?

Me:  Ummm, yes and no.  The Android box lets me plug in a USB hard drive with our movies and music on it and take it with us.  It doesn't need to be connected to the Internet to work.

Wife:  Hmpf...

Long story short, I received a Uhost2 and Air Mouse for my birthday.  There is a specific version of XBMC for the Rockchip and the like ARM processors that makes use of the hardware video processing, it's called Libstagefright .  I've been installing new versions as they get released and it's really come a long way usability wise.  Video use to stutter and get out of sync due to the GPU not being utilized, but it's quite usable now.  I still tend to use Mx Player if I'm watching a movie, but I still love XBMC.

I got one of these Air Mouses for controlling the Uhost2, works pretty good though if I were to get another I'd probably go for one of the Mele ones  as I've heard good things about them.

Anyway, here we are in our trailer with our selection of movies, tv shows and music to keep us entertained when we want.  Life is sweet!

Off to watch an episode of Duck Dynasty. ;)

Steve

Active Directory export for our Learning Management System

Getting back to the AD Import and Export to our Learning Management System, after importing the Managers into AD I added the manager field to the export as seen below.

$Date = (Get-Date -format "dd-MM-yyyy")
if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
    Add-PsSnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement
}

get-qaduser -SearchRoot 'domain.local/Users' -enabled -dontusedefaultincludedproperties -includedproperties sn,givenName,sAMAccountName,employeeNumber,telephoneNumber,mail,title,manager -SizeLimit 0 | sort-object | select-object sAMAccountName,employeeNumber,givenName,telephoneNumber,title,sn,mail,manager | export-csv -Delimiter ',' -NoTypeInformation -Path \\ServerX\LMS\LMS_export$Date.csv

Slight issue is that the 'manager' field in AD gives the container of the manager's account, LMS vendor can't work with that and wants the sAMAccountName for the manager.   Hmmmm, ok.
After some more poking around for a solution I came up with something that...

• reads in the users from AD
• adds a new null value property called 'ManagerSam' for each user
• looks at each user and if the Manager field is not empty uses the Quest ActiveRoles tool 'get-qaduser' to lookup the sAMAccountName of the manager
• assigns the sAMAccountName of the manager to our new 'ManagerSam' property
• then takes all that and selects, sorts and exports to CSV

The following is what the script looks like...

$Date = (Get-Date -format "dd-MM-yyyy")
if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
    Add-PsSnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement
}
$users = get-qaduser -SearchRoot 'domain.local/Users' -enabled -dontusedefaultincludedproperties -includedproperties sn,givenName,sAMAccountName,employeeNumber,telephoneNumber,mail,title,manager -SizeLimit 0
$users | Add-Member Noteproperty -Name ManagerSam -value $null
foreach ($user in $users){
    If ($user.Manager -ne $null){
        $user.ManagerSam = (get-qaduser -identity $user.Manager).samaccountname
        }
}
$users | select-object sAMAccountName,employeeNumber,givenName,telephoneNumber,title,sn,mail,managersam | sort-object sAMAccountName | export-csv -Delimiter ',' -NoTypeInformation -Path \\serverX\LMS\LMS_ad_export$Date.csv

Works like a charm and doesn't take forever to run.  More importantly it gives our LMS vendor what they need to have their software function correctly.  And that’s a fabulous thing!  :)

Steve

Audio/Video Conferencing with Openfire

We've been using Openfire for departmental instant messaging for some time now, which is described on their site as...

"a cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol."

It's been working quite well for us using their Spark client as well as using the Pidgin client.  My boss saw that there is a video conferencing plugin for Openfire and thought that it could be quite useful for a number of purposes.

The one he was looking at was one that uses WebRTC for the audio/video piece in the browser, though the plug-in is still under development and is only able to utilize Chrome browser.  So I happened upon the Redfire plug-in for Openfire that describes itself as

"Redfire is a plugin for Openfire that embeds the Red5 RTMP server, Cumulus RTMFP server and modified Phono SDK to provide audio/video streaming tools for XMPP application development."

 So the plug-in has a lot going on in the backend to make things happen.  Installation of the plug-in is as simple as unzipping the war file into the Openfire plugins directory of the Openfire server and restarting the service.

After I restarted the Openfire server I was scratching my head for a while over a number of errors that were thrown up in the console, such as "SLF4J: Class path contains multiple SLF4J bindings". 

After poking at it for a while I figured out it was actually running even with the errors.

So opening http://our_server:7070/redfire brought up the Redfire testing screen which allowed us to play around a little and confirm things were working as expected.  At the bottom of this page there is a link to download the Spark plug-in to get it to work seamlessly with Spark.  When someone initiates a video conference to a Pidgin client it will display a URL to click on to join the conference, still working on a way to initiate a video conference from Pidgin.

Some of the clients that we rolled this out to had issues with bringing up local audio/video, a quick update of Flash and all was well with the world.

Long story short, Openfire server with the Redfire plug-in makes for a nice little Instant Messaging/AV Conferencing server.  Oh, did I also mention you can connect it to a VOIP gateway to make external calls.


Steve