Thursday 25 February 2010

Converting VMware Images to Hyper V ones

I found this in a newsgroup posting: have not tried it yet but it seems an elegant solution. The excerpt below is from a posting by Steen Kirkby.

Running VMware Images and Hyper V Images on the same box

I was asked to do this the other day and it can cause you a lot of headaches. So hats off to Steve Graegert who has a nice solution in his blog, see link for details

Thursday 11 February 2010

Lotus Notes and McAffee Anti Virus

If you are running notes clients and McAffee anti virus on workstations you will need to ensure that you make exclusions in scanning and on access policies to make sure that notes files are not scanned.

Monday 8 February 2010

Useful site for free applications

Have a look at Ninite : its a great one stop shop for getting those useful free apps. It may not be relevant for work laptops but for home machines it can be a great time saver if you are setting up a new system or looking for useful stuff.

There are quite a few links in there: you only have to select the ones you are interested in and it will do all the work for you: installing them all at once.

Of the stuff there here is what I would recommend:

Firefox: more stable and secure than internet explorer
Songbird: a good alternative for those worried about the "bloat" associated with Itunes. My personal favourite is MediaMonkey which is not on this site: but if you have a big media collection its well worth looking at (http://www.mediamonkey.com/): it even works with iPods.
VLC: a great application which can play just about any video file: much easier than installing all those codecs for Media Player and faster too
Paint.net: really nice graphics app: does not have all the features of photoshop of course but then the chances are that you'll never use them anyway....
InfranView: great viewer for pictures: fed up with the slow load times when opening pictures sent as mail attachments: this will do it much faster
Microsoft Security Essentials: many people scoffed when this came out but it actually does very well in finding spyware
Spybot: a more complete any spyware product: it does not run in memory which means that it does not slow down your system: but you do need to remember to run a clean occasionally
CCleaner: takes care of all those temporary files that build up in your profile: which can sometimes run to many gigabytes of data, it could save you having to shell out for a new hard drive
Revo Uninstaller: windows does a poor job of uninstalling applications often leaving bits and pieces behind: this does it much better and faster
CD Burner XP: no need to shell out for Nero if you want to burn CDs: this does the job for free. Bear in mind: not required if you have Windows 7.

Thursday 4 February 2010

Nokia E71 handsets and Lotus Traveler

Being a domino house we use Lotus Traveler for push mail onto our mobiles. To this end we have Nokia E71s which support this.

I found that the latest version of traveler which comes with Domino 8.5.1 (there's a fixpack out for this too) seems more reliable than the first version.

The phones themselves work OK with it although there's an issue whereby after a few days the push eliment seems to drop. Firmware updates on the phones seem to help but there is a frustration here. Nokia make new firmware versions available dependant on the "code" of the phone. On their site they say that version 300.21.012 is available for the E71s (I think there is also a newer version 400.21.013 available but this may be US only) but our phone codes prevent us from using this. Orange say there is nothing they can do about this and there's little chance of getting any change out of Nokia.

Even more frustratingly we cannot order new E71s that can be updated to the latest version: you have to take what you are sent. Perhaps a chat with our orange customer manager is in order.

How to disable IPv6 via Group Policy

How to disable IPv6 via Group Policy


Just a quick one: I used this link to set up a group policy to disable IPv6 for my Windows 7 machines.

Tuesday 2 February 2010

Business Objects Enterprise under Red Hat 4

I've spent the past 4 days preparing a Red Hat 4 virtual machine for installation of Business Objects Enterprise 3.1. It was a pretty thankless task.

I like to play around with Linux now and then but the lack of available documentation on this had me stumped a few times.

I'll be posting a howto in a few days when the documentation is done but if anyone at SAP is listening: a little more information would do down well.

Monday 1 February 2010

Swyx 7

Over the next few weeks I'll be implementing an upgrade to our telephony software. We currently use Swyx which I've found to be a very reliable and cost effective solution. We use version 5 on some quite old hardware but the move over to Windows 7 means its upgrade time.

I'll be posting on the upgrade process and what it means technically and practically to our organisation.

I've decided to take a quite cautious approach to the implementation. We will set up a new server with its own ISDN card and run both in parallel for a while for testing. Swyx offer a bundle of their products which seems very cost effective: among the most interesting options here is the one for mobile telephony. There is currently a disconnect between the office phones and the mobile phones. We have a lot of people who are consulting "on the road" : for these people the office fixed lines are almost irrelevant. I want to bring these people back into the mix if I can : but I'm not looking forward to pushing out the Sywx mobile software onto a diverse mix of mobile phones: more as it happens!