Microsoft

Outlook 2003 – POP3 – Downloading duplicate mails

Today I got a mail from one of the clients saying his outlook is downloading same messaged again and again for the past couple of days and the mails are there even after deleting them number of times. I took remote of his computer and there were thousands of mails accumulated over the past couple of days.

This can happen due to a number of reasons including but not limited to:

  • Multiple mail forwards set
  • Multiple email accounts setup
  • Leaving a copy of mail on the server
  • Corrupt outlook installation
  • Connection issue (Internet and application)
  • Antivirus

In this case, the customer had around 63 mails to be downloaded, a slow internet connection and Kaspersky installed. When outlook was trying to download mails, the antivirus was kicking in and scanning the emails in the meantime the connection with pop server was getting timed out. Since, the connection was not getting properly closed, all those emails were again getting downloaded next time outlook was trying to sync.

To fix the issue, I turned off the antivirus and set outlook to download only headers, hit F9 and it worked like a charm. Once it had all the 63 mails downloaded, I scanned them manually with Kaspersky and then changed the outlook download setting to download full items. Monitored it for 4 hours and everything seemed okay.

General/Misc

Acer D2D erecovery corrupt

At a client location, I had to reimage an old Acer desktop computer. Installing it traditionally using the CD would have taken hours and then finding and installing the drivers. ALT+F10 usually works on Acers for factory restore but was not working on this computer. I checked in the disk management and the recovery partition was there. Using Hiren’s Boot Disc, I was able to mount the partition and see the files in it. Then the question was how to use it to restore, after a deep search on google, I followed these steps to make D2D work and do a factory restore:

  1. Confirm if the recovery partition is still there by going to Control panel > Administrator tools > Computer management > Disk management (Sometimes, a reinstallation or an attempt to do so may corrupt the partition)
  2. Once the partition is there, you can use any of those partition mounting tools available on the internet to mount the recovery partition and see if you are able to browse through the files and folders and also try to copy a file to your C drive to double confirm that the partition is okay and not only showing ghost files.
  3. If all looks good, browse the root of the recovery partition and you should be able to see these two files: mbrwrwin.exe & rtmbr.bin
  4. Now that all seems good, launch CMD and go to the drive letter of the mounted partition and type: mbrwrwin.exe install rtmbr.bin and hit enter. It will take some time and you will see some activity on the CMD window once finish, you can restart the computer and use the D2D recovery console.
  5. Immediately after you see the ACER logo on the screen, press and hold the ALT key on the keyboard and start tapping F10 until you see the Acer recovery wizard. You can follow the on screen prompts to recover your computer to the factory settings. One important thing to keep in mind is that it will delete everything on the C drive so you may keep your data on the D drive.

**This method has been tried and tested personally by me on 20 dec 2012 and found to be working. Before this, ALT + F10 was not working but worked on the first try afterwards.

Microsoft

Red X on network icon – Windows 7

Today I thought I should take care of this long pending issue of Network icon in the system tray showing a red x even though the internet is working and it is connected.

red x on network
Annoying Red X on network

After googling for some time regarding this issue, I discovered that uninstalling Oracle VM virtual box has helped people in this case. That reminded me that I did install virtaulbox when I was trying to make a virtual Xen server which was possible on Oracle VM virtual box.

uninstall virtual box
Uninstalling Oracle VM Virtual box

Without waiting any longer, I uninstalled Oracle VM virtual box as it was not being used any longer and BANG! the red x mark disappeared immediately.

red x gone
Red X gone

So the suggested resolution worked like a charm. Thanks google!!

General/Misc

TimeClock Plus 4: Not allowing to edit time

We recently did a network upgrade where we upgraded from Windows server SBS 2003 to Windows server SBS 2011. Client was using TimeClock Plus 4 to manage employee attendance which was successfully moved to the new server. There was no problem in accessing the old data or pulling out any reports and users were able to punch in/out normally. The issue surfaced when the supervisor tried to manually update the timesheet for an employee and the system didn’t allow that. Timeclock works in client server configuration where the server application is installed on the server and the folder is shared so that users could install the client application and mark their timesheets which happens on the shared folder on the server.

After reinstalling and reconfiguring, it still didn’t work. Here is what was happening:

    • Supervisor was able to edit the timesheet when done on remote desktop of the server and the changes were showing while accessing it elsewhere.
    • Supervisor was not able to edit when opened from shared folder.
    • The network share permissions were given to everyone.

I figured out that somehow the software is not able to edit the files from any other machine but the server (where we were connecting using remote desktop and administrator account) so changing the NTFS permissions was worth a try and VOILA! it worked.

I was able to fix the issue by adding the windows username of the supervisor to security tab of the shared folder. The issue occurred as the user did have full Share rights but no NTFS rights.

Appassure, General/Misc

AppAssure 5 – Intro

Dell purchased Appassure early this year and came up with Dell AppAssure 5 as the latest version with a name change from Replay to Dell Appassure. The one thing which would make it a preferred choice among other products in the same category is “Live Recovery“.
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Live recovery empowers you to access the mission critical applications and data instantly while rest of the data is being recovered. What it means is, lets suppose somehow everything on your server or data store is lost. If you have had Appassure protection, you would be able to access all your data in minutes using this DR(Disaster recovery) solution. Now, you have access to 2 TB of data but it would take some time to copy it over to a new location since all the data is compressed and stored in its own patented container format. What if you need immediate access to your project files you were working on? Well, all you have to do is to start the recovery process and AppAssure will first show you the whole directory structure almost instantly and will start copying the actual data in the background. You can then navigate your way to the folder or the files you want and copy it to another location or launch it if its an executable file. AppAssure will recover that file/folder first and keep recovering the rest of the data in the background. You can very well imagine how useful this could prove to be in a situation like that.
I was so impressed with it that I registered myself on http://license.appassure.com and downloaded a trial to try my hands on it. I will add more articles regarding installation and implementation of AppAssure in coming days.

Image source: www.appassure.com