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Had a situation with a customer who is running Sage Instant Accounts version 16 being extremly slow to respond after the installation of Trend Worry Free Business Security.

The problem is most noticiable when switching between modules within Sage, which was taking around 20 seconds.

Adding all the recommend exclusions did not make any difference, but using the Trend Micro Performance Tuning tool fixed the problem instantly.

The tool can be downloaded from:

http://esupport.trendmicro.com/Pages/Identifying-and-resolving-performance-related-issues-caused-by-Behavior-Monitoring-and-Device-Control-features.aspx

Simply add “SBDDesktop.exe” to the exception list and Sage runs at normal speed.

Add SDBDesktop.exe to the exception list to speed up Sage

Categories : Uncategorized
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Today I was trying to use clnpack.exe fom a command line to automatically create updated installation packages for Trend Officescan on a weekly basis.  This seemed a simple case of putting together a command line but I wasn’t having any luck getting it working.

Annoyingly clnpack.exe does not give any error messages at all if the syntax of the commad is not perfect and you get nowhere.  In the end I discovered that I could only make clnpack.exe work by using 8.3 file paths instead of long path names.

An example of a working command line:


C:\PROGRA~1\TRENDM~1\OfficeScan\PCCSRV\Admin\Utility\ClientPackager\clnpack.exe /i /o NT /s C:\PROGRA~1\TRENDM~1\OfficeScan\PCCSRV /d d:\shared~1\software\trend32.exe

You can see 8.3 format filenames by going into a command prompt and using:

dir /x

Now that I have this command working I can integrate it with a batch file which will upload it to our web server.

Categories : Technical Posts
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We’ve been using the Linksys SPA942 handsets for a while and they have worked very well for us. One of the major annoyances for us and others is the inability to populate the personal directory automatically.

I’ve read a number of posts on how to use wget to issue to personal directory to the phone via a HTTP post and this seemed like a good solution. In particular this post and this post inspired me to see if I could create a solution using the same technique in VB.Net.

So I have put together a simple program which will allow you to load/save a personal directory to/from a tab delimited file or handset. There are loads of enhancements that could be made in order to make the application more sophisticated but this is really a first attempt, so please report any problems.  You will need .net framework 3.0 to run the tool.  I’ll put the project into a proper setup file if it is sufficiently popular.

Here is a screenshot of the utility:

Download here:

SPA 942 Personal Directory Manager

I’m using firmware version 6.1.5a, I’d be interested to hear if this does/does not work on other versions or if anyone has any suggestions for enhancements.

This is also a great way to backup/restore your Linksys SPA handset – I factory reset my handset and this much easier than re-entering all the personal directory.

Categories : Scripts & Utilities
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This is a script that I posted to the Draytek forum a couple of years ago, I noticed that it has been a very popular post so I have decided to post here also.

The function of the script is to perform scheduled reboots of Draytek routers.  Optionally is it possible to reboot the router only if a specified IP address does not respond to a ping request.  This is useful to test if a VPN connection is functioning, and only reboot the router if there is no response.

Early Draytek firmwares had a tendancy to lose VPN connectivity and a reboot is the only way to restore the connection.

First of you need to install the Toolsack Baseline components for this script to work:

http://www.toolsack.com/download/

The script needs to be supplied with parameters, so a typical command line would look like this:

cscript reboot.vbs 86.11.93.131 routerpassword

and a conditional command line would look like this:

cscript reboot.vbs 86.11.93.131 routerpassword 192.168.1.254

The 3rd argument will be tested for a ping response, if none is received then a reboot will be executed.

Here is the code, save it as reboot.vbs:

set args=wscript.arguments

If wscript.arguments.count=2 then
   IP=args.item(0)
   Password=args.item(1)
   call reboot(IP,Password)
elseif wscript.arguments.count=3 then
   IP=args.item(0)
   Password=args.item(1)
   TestIP=args.item(2)
   if ping(TestIP)=False then
      call reboot(IP,Password)
   end if
else
   wscript.echo "Invalid number of arguments specified"
   wscript.echo "Please specify router IP address & password and optional test IP"
end if

sub reboot(IP, Password)
   set s = CreateObject("Toolsack.Socket")
   s.Connect IP, 23
       s.Write Password & vbCrLf
   s.write "sys reboot" & vbcrlf
   s.write "quit" & vbcrlf
end sub

Function Ping(strHost)

    dim objPing, objRetStatus

    set objPing = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}").ExecQuery _
      ("select * from Win32_PingStatus where address = '" & strHost & "'")

    for each objRetStatus in objPing
        if IsNull(objRetStatus.StatusCode) or objRetStatus.StatusCode<>0 then
       Ping = False
        else
            Ping = True
        end if
    next
End Function 
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Had a customer report a problem today with the Small Business Server Managment console not being able to show the status of the backups and just hanging at “Loading…”

Small Business Server 2003 Backup Console

Visiting the backup URL manually ( http://localhost/backup/default.aspx ) enabled me to see the backup reports as normal.  Had a quick look in the code of default.htm which is the page that the “Manage Small Business Server Backup” console loads and saw that it is really just a javascript redirect.

Turns out that this server had scripting disabled for the intranet zone and therefore the page redirection was never happening.

Once scripting was enabled again the backup console started working as expected.  Couldn’t find mention of anyone else having this problem so thought I would post.

Categories : Technical Posts
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I am always forgetting the syntax for the New-ExchangeCertificate cmdlet when I need to do a new certificate request so I decided to write a little bit of javascript to build up the command automatically. Its much easier to copy and paste it from here than work with in it the Exchange 2007 Command Shell.

So just fill in the fields below and the command will be built automatically in the box below. Then just copy into command shell. If required, seperate the “Subject Alternative Names” with commas.

Common Name:

Subject Alternative Names:
Organisation:
Organisational Unit:
Town/City:
County/State:
Country:

CSR Command:

I am thinking of duplicating this code and writing another post which will generate the commands for the import of the newly generated certificate.

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