It’s finally official, Sony’s Blu-ray wins the HD format war.

From MSNBC: Toshiba announced today that it will no longer make HD DVD players and recorders. Toshiba’s president, Atsutoshi Nishida, said that Warner Bros. Entertainment’s decision last month to release videos in Blu-ray format only had a tremendous impact and they simply had no chance to win.

An estimated 1 million HD DVD players have been sold worldwide and Toshiba promises that it will still continue to provide support for them.

Also see: Is Sony’s Blu-Ray winning?

I had to do this just a few minutes ago and I figured I should probably post it here.

1. Open Registry Editor by going to Start -> Run and typing in regedit.
2. Go to File -> Connect Network Registry… and type in the name of the computer where you want Remote Desktop enabled.  Click OK.
3. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server of that computer.
4. Double-click the DWORD called fDenyTSConnections and set its value to 0.  Click OK.

That’s it! Remote Desktop is now enabled!

It sure sounds like it. According to Reuters, Wal-Mart has decided to abandon Toshiba’s HD DVD format and will only sell Blu-ray players and movies starting in June of this year. Best Buy and Netflix earlier this week have decided to only support the Blu-ray format as well.

Here’s a list of some of the companies currently supporting Blu-ray:

1. Sony Corp (of course)
2. Target
3. Best Buy
4. Wal-Mart
5. Netflix
6. Blockbuster
7. News Corp’s 20th Century Fox
8. Walt Disney Co
9. Lion’s Gate Entertainment Corp
10. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
11. Warner Bros. Entertainment

Even Microsoft (maker of the XBox 360 console, which currently only works with HD DVD) said that it could consider supporting the Blu-ray technology if that’s what the consumers want.

Error Message: “Mapi session “/o=Organization/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=JohnSmith” exceeded the maximum of 32 objects of type “session”".
Source: MSExchangeIS
Event ID: 9646

On the client side, the user is unable to connect to Microsoft Exchange or getting this error:

Unable to open your default e-mail folders. The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server is down for maintenance.

This usually happens when the user loses network connectivity while Outlook is still open. The Exchange server wasn’t able to close the sessions properly so they just stayed there even when they are not in use.

By default, Exchange only allows up to 32 MAPI (Outlook) sessions per user. To fix this problem, you must close some of the sessions.

What to do:

1. Download and extract Sysinternals’ TCPView (free) on the Exchange server
2. Open the Exchange Management Shell and type in the following command to get a list of all the opened sessions. Make a note of the IP Addresses: Get-LogonStatistics jsmith | Sort-Object clientipaddress | Format-Table username,clientipaddress,logontime
3. Open Tcpview.exe on the server. Sort it by Remote Address, then sort it by Process.
4. Look for the IP Addresses from Step 2 in the Remote Address column (if you only see hostnames, go to Options -> uncheck Resolve Addresses) and close their connections for the store.exe process (right-click and choose Close Connection, you can select multiple connections by holding the Shift or Ctrl key)
5. Run the command from Step 2 again and you will see that the sessions disappeared. The user should now be able to connect to the Exchange server again.

Don’t forget this very important day! It’s the last Friday of July (July 25 for this year). Mark it on your calendar!

Ok, I have to admit that I actually didn’t know that such a day existed until I found this site, which is the official System Administrator Appreciation Day website.

According to the site, this idea to have a special day for SysAdmins was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator in Chicago. He was inspired by a print ad for a Hewlett-Packer laserjet printer showing lines of employees bringing gifts for the IT guy who made the purchase.

The first SysAdmin Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000. It has gained support from organizations such as the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), Friends In Tech (FIT), Sunbelt Software, and “In The Trenches,” a podcast for SysAdmins.

The System Administrator Song

Related articles:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1460166.stm
• http://mcpmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=367

It’s that time of the month again, the second Tuesday of every month known as “Patch Tuesday,” the time when Microsoft releases its security updates.

According to Microsoft’s website, they will be releasing 12 new security updates this Tuesday, February 12. Seven considered “Critical”, five marked as “Important.”

Critical (7) - Software Affected:

1. Windows
2. Internet Explorer
3. Office
4. Visual Basic
5. VBScript
6. JSCript

Important (5) - Software Affected:

1. Windows
2. Active Directory
3. ADAM
4. IIS
5. Office
6. Works
7. Works Suite

Happy Patch Tuesday fellow systems admins, let’s hope nothing breaks!

Error message: “An error occurred while retrieving information from the NCP. There may be a problem with your network connection. Error info: [12002 - Communications error: The request has timed out.]”

I got this error message earlier while trying to download call records from the NBX. The problem turned out to be Internet Explorer 7. After uninstalling IE7 and restarting my computer, it worked! The funny thing is it worked before even when I had IE7 installed. So I reinstalled IE7 back just to make sure it’s really IE7 causing this problem and sure enough the problem came back.

This problem is actually listed in the 3Com NBX R6.0.35 Release Notes:

NBX Call Report can have problems retrieving records when it is running on a computer that has Internet Explorer 7 installed. If you experience this problem, you can uninstall IE 7 or run NBX Call Reports from a different computer where IE 7 is not installed. Note: NBX R6.0 and the optional applications have not yet been tested with IE 7. (ID 46308)

You can download the entire release notes from here: 3Com NBX R6.0.35 Release Notes

This is good news for those who need to unprotect an Excel spreadsheet without knowing the password, bad news for those who actually think protecting an Excel spreadsheet is secure enough (this has only been tested on Excel files created with Excel 2003 or older).

According to this website, the passwords you enter in Excel are not used directly in protection. They are actually hashed and there are only 194,560 possible hashed values. You can then use a macro to try out all these possible combinations and a modern home computer can crack the password in seconds.

Use the free add-in below from mcgimpsey.com to remove the password for a protected Excel spreadsheet. Simply open it and you will see an extra button called “Remove Passwords.” Open the file you wish to unprotect and click the button to unlock it.

remove_internal_excel_password.xls

Here’s the macro code:

remove_internal_excel_passwords_macro.txt

Error Message: “The operation failed due to an installation problem. Restart Outlook and try again.”

I received this error message this morning when I opened Outlook 2003 with a new user profile. It opened fine with the local Administrator account.

I checked the Windows Event Viewer and there’s a “Warning” entry there for MsiInstaller (Event ID 1004) with a description of “Detection of product… The resource ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\UserData’ does not exist.”

Doing the following fixed the problem for me:

1. Start -> Run -> type in regedit
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common
3. (I recommend that you back up your registry first before making any changes) Right-click on Common -> New -> DWORD Value. Name it UserData
4. Double click on the DWORD you just created (UserData) and set Value data: to 1
5. Close the Registry Editor and open Outlook again

Microsoft will be having launch events across the country for their three new products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. The first one is on February 27, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA. They’ll be giving away a promotional kit with versions of all three products to those who attend.

Click here to register.

We went to their launch event last year for Vista and Office 2007 and it was pretty good. They gave away a full version of Office 2007 Professional to those who stayed until 2:00PM or so. I remember this one guy fighting with the employees there because they wouldn’t give him a copy of Office 2007 since it was too early, lol.