Grimesy's BlogJust me losing sleep over IT.

Come across some excellent open source disk encryption software today.

•Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
•Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.
•Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).
•Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
•Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.
•Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors.
•Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:

Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

Visit http://www.truecrypt.org/ to download!

Today we have had servers and workstations fallen over left right and center. After some investigation it looks like the cause of the issue is ESET NOD32 AV. It’s affecting server 2003, Windows XP up to Windows 7.

Many users are experiencing the issue and are expressing their annoyance here – http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1741364

ESET state that a simple reboot may fix the issue temporarily, but have stated that they will definitely have a new update ready by the morning.

All fun and games at the zoo.

Managed to get this working today, i can now call any number from within my Outlook contacts or via a manual input from dialer.exe

 Check here – http://www.ipcom.at/en/telephony/siptapi/

SIPTAPI itself is not a complete SIP phone, but acts as a “3rd Party Call Controller” on your SIP devices, instructing them to call the desired phone number. Grimesy

I came across this website when researching an issue i had with Exchange 2007.

From this website you can troubleshoot ActiveSync issues, Outlook Anywhere issues and Autodiscover issues.

Click the link to take a look - https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

Hey Guys,

Came across this great tool today which allows you to view/edit/remove/export entries stored in your .nk2 file!

For those pondering what a .nk2 file is, it’s the file that stores previously typed in email address within Outlook. A big annoyance for most users is when the .nk2 file will cache an old or incorrect email address, this tool will help you if you are in that big boat!

Tool can be found at this site – http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/outlook_nk2_autocomplete.html all credits go to the orignal developer.

Hope some peeps find it useful.

Dan Grimes

Just installed Vista/Server 2008 on a new ML115 and experiencing complete system crashes?

Recently i had the task of building and prepping a new Proliant ML115 server for a customer. The server was to be running Server 2008 standard.

So i installed this perfectly fine, all drivers except VGA installed all ok, so i thought great!! But no… not long after this i experienced my first crash, the mouse wouldn’t move and nothing would respond. So i forced a hard reboot and decided to carry on with my build. Viola! again it happened a few hours later, so after seeing it twice i checked the system log to find Event ID 129 caused by “nvstor”!! The server seemed to crash when heavy read/write activity was going over the storage controller.

Called HP because this server was under a new 1 year HP carepack and logged a case. But before they could get back to me i dug a little deeper and found that the storage controllers were using a microsoft driver but not only that, they were out of date too. Microsoft update would also not update these drivers because it stated that the current driver was already the latest one.

After finding out that the controllers were of the nForce series i went straight to the Nvidia website and found the latest nForce drivers. Below are the links to the 32 & 64 bit versions.

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/nforce_vista32_15.51b_uk.html - 32Bit

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/nforce_vista64_15.51b_uk.html - 64Bit

They do state as being Vista drivers, however i have installed these drivers on 5 ML115′s running Server 2008 now with the exact same problem and this had fixed each and every single one.

Hope this article comes to help others and save time that i lost!

Dan Grimes

Hi all,

Came across this tool on my travels in googleland. Comes in handy if an .nk2 file is corrupt or missing etc…

Navigate to this link to download it  http://nk2.emenems.net/start all credits go to the original devloper.

I am sure some of you are thinking. Q: “What in the earth is a .nk2 file?”

A: It’s the file that stores all typed in email addresses within Outlook. Email addresses typed in to the ‘To’ / ‘Cc’ / ‘Bcc’ fields. Some people refer to this as their address book and use this to lookup previously used email address.

If anyone has any similar useful tools for helpdesk staff or system admins email me here and i’ll post them up!

Dan Grimes

Hi all!

Today I’ve managed to install and get my first wordpress blog running.

Over time I will get used to the idea of blogging and will start to fill this place with all sorts of content.

Check back from time to time to see what’s new.

Grimesy.