dunxd - Page 2 - Developer IT

What are the essential considerations for setting up systems in a location with unreliable power?

- by dunxd

I deal with a lot of remote offices located in parts of the world where the local grid power supply is unreliable. Power can go off anytime with no warning, with outages ranging from minutes to days Power fluctuation is wild, with spikes and brown outs Currently the offices will have some or all of the following: A generator, with an inverter, or some sort of manual switch A big UPS or battery array connecting a number of devices Several smaller APC UPS with computers attached Low cost Voltage Regulators sometimes connected between mains and UPS or device. I know that each of these things needs to be appropriately rated for the equipment to which it is connected (although I am not sure how to calculate the correct rating). The offices will generally have the following equipment (in varying quantities): some sort of internet connection device (VSAT router, ADSL modem, WiMax router) Cisco ASA 5505 firewall a bunch of PCs printers one server I don't seek to replace the advice of an electrician, but in some of these locations they only answer the questions you ask them, so I need to make sure I have enough understanding of the essentials to protect equipment from damage, and possibly get through some power cuts.

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How to include a non-breaking hyphen in hyperlink text in Word 2010

- by dunxd

I want to include a URL in word document, both as text people can read, and a link they can click. The URL has a hyphen in it. I don't want the URL to get broken across lines. When I use a regular hyphen, the link works, but the text displayed gets broken. When I use a non-breaking hyphen (Ctrl+Shift+-) Word removes the hyphen from the link. When I try and manually edit the hyperlink, I can't add a non-breaking hyphen into the Text to display field using Ctrl+Shift+-. If I was writing this is HTML I could just do: <a href="http://www.my-link.com/">www.my‑link.com</a> How do I get Word to do the equivalent?

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Allowing Sharepoint to relay email through Exchange

- by dunxd

I have written a Sharepoint 2007 web part that sends a field from a form to a specified email address. I have got the form working as I require, but at present it can only send to internal email addresses. Sharepoint's email functions use SMTP to send to our Exchange 2003 server, but because our Exchange server is configured to prevent relaying, if the To: address is not at a local domain, it won't deliver the mail. I don't want to open up our Exchange server to be a completely open relay. What I want is to allow my Sharepoint servers to send mail to addresses outside our domain. The following seem possible: Allow all mail sent from one of the Sharepoint servers to be relayed Allow all mail from a web application pool account to be relayed (I am not sure that the application pool authenticates to the SMTP server though) A combination of the two Can anyone advise on the best way of doing this? Is setting up a dedicated SMTP server on the Exchange server (not a separate physical server) the right way of going about this? EDIT: Note this is for Exchange 2003. There is a post on setting this up in Exchange 2007 which appears to have recognised the frequent requirement to do what I need. It doesn't give much detail on 2003 though. Can anyone expand?

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Customising Exchange 2003 quota warning message

- by dunxd

I need to customise the default email users get when their Exchange 2003 mailbox reaches one of the limits. There are a lot of pages online on how to do this using a tool that was hosted at http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/quotamsgsvc. However, this site has been discontinued, and Microsoft do not appear to have migrated this bit of code over. Does anyone know an alternative option, or where the QuotaMSGSvc might now be found?

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Outbound ports to allow through firewall - core requirements

- by dunxd

This question was asked before, but in a rather general way. I'm asking more specifically based on my current requirements. We have a number of remote offices made up of a bunch of PCs and an ASA 5505 which is used as firewall and VPN termination point. In the offices we share the internet connection with one or more other organisations over whom we have very little control, asides from the config on the ASAs. For a bunch of reasons I'd like to lock down these ASA 5505s to only allow outbound traffic to ports used by applications we know we need. I'm putting a standard config to roll out to all the ASAs, and if we need to open up ports for the other orgs we can do it on request. But I want to leave open the most commonly required ports so we can get up and running without waiting on other folks technical staff to get back. I plan to allow the following TCP ports to support email and web access, which I know everyone will need: POP3 (110 and 995) HTTP (80 and 443) IMAP4 (143 and 993) SMTP (25 and and 465) The question really is, what other ports do I need to leave open to allow for "normal" working? I've seen UDP port 53 for DNS as one. Are there any others that would be worth opening up? Just to note - I'll also be setting up monitoring systems to keep an eye on the ports we do allow. Any of the above could be misused of course. We'll also back all this up with signed agreements. But I'm aiming for a technical solutions where I don't have to start out with the full requirements of everyone we share connections with. See also: outbound ports that are always open

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Outbound ports to allow through firewall

- by dunxd

This question was asked before, but in a rather general way. I'm asking more specifically based on my current requirements. We have a number of remote offices made up of a bunch of PCs and an ASA 5505 which is used as firewall and VPN termination point. In the offices we share the internet connection with one or more other organisations over whom we have very little control, asides from the config on the ASAs. For a bunch of reasons I'd like to lock down these ASA 5505s to only allow outbound traffic to ports used by applications we know we need. I'm putting a standard config to roll out to all the ASAs, and if we need to open up ports for the other orgs we can do it on request. But I want to leave open the most commonly required ports so we can get up and running without waiting on other folks technical staff to get back. I plan to allow the following TCP ports to support commonly required resources: POP3 (110 and 995) HTTP (80 and 443) IMAP4 (143 and 993) SMTP (25 and and 465) The question really is, what other ports do I need to leave open to allow for "normal" working. I've seen UDP port 53 for DNS as one. Are there any others that would be worth opening up? Just to note - I'll also be setting up monitoring systems to keep an eye on the ports we do allow. Any of the above could be misused of course. We'll also back all this up with signed agreements. But I'm aiming for a technical solutions where I don't have to start out with the full requirements of everyone we share connections with. See also: outbound ports that are always open

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Outlook 2010 stopped marking messages as read after reading them

- by dunxd

Yesterday I noticed that Outlook 2010 had stopped marking messages as read unless I right click and select Mark as Read. I have checked the Reading Panel settings (it's set to 0 seconds), but I don't use the reading panel to read my mail. When I open a message by doubleclicking it, then close it again, the message is still marked as Read. Outlook 2010 is connecting to Exchange Server 2003. This was working fine until yesterday. As far as I know there have been no config changes at either the client or server end.

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VMware vSwitches and spanning tree

- by dunxd

I have two redundant core switches I want to connect to a new vSwitch I am setting up on a VMware ESX host. The switch will have two physical NICs each of which will connect to one of the core switches. The core switches are connected. If this was a physical switch, I would worry about connecting it to both core switches, because this would create a network loop. Do I need to worry about this for a VMware virtual switch? VMware's documentation says it is not possible to connect two vSwitches in a loop, therefore STP is not required. However, I am worried about connecting two physical switches together via a vSwitch.

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What is the name for a DNS record starting with @? [closed]

- by dunxd

Possible Duplicate: What's the meaning of '@' in a DNS zone file? I know that DNS records starting with * are called Wildcard records. What is the name for DNS record starting with @ (the at symbol). This is a record for the root domain (e.g. just example.com, not www.example.com) I want to find out more, but searching for "@ record dns" in Google doesn't return any useful results. What is the correct terminology for this type of record, and where might I find it described in more detail? RFC 1035 describes the use of @ in a DNS record, but doesn't go as far as giving it a name.

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Using unless in rails uniqueness validation

- by dunxd

I am just starting out in Rails, and trying to develop a simple application. I need to validate three values submitted to the application - each must meet the same validation criteria. The validation is pretty simple: Value is valid if unqiue, null or equal to "p" or "d". The following gets me halfway there: validates_uniqueness_of :value1, :value2, :value3, :allow_nil => true I think I can use :unless to check whether the value is either "p" or "d", however I can't figure out how. I guess I am trying to combine validates_uniqueness_of with validates_inclusion_of. Any suggestions?

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Sharepoint Web Part validation set off by Publishing Controls

- by dunxd

I have a web part which uses validation on a textbox field to prevent submission of an empty field. When clicking on Check In to Share Draft or Publish, this validation is done, and since I am not actually trying to submit the form, but rather check it in, I'd rather this didn't happen. How can I achieve this? See also: Sharepoint web part form validation blocks updating web part settings - this has the validation code, and how I solved the problem of the EditorPart setting off the validation.

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