Arricc

OpenDNS – free filtered DNS for the masses

I’ve just started using a new (free) service called OpenDNS – http://www.opendns.com – at home and I’ve also set it up at work.

You need to know very little about How The Web Works™ to know that this can be a good thing.

DNS is where your computer takes a name like www.livejournal.com and turns it into a number that is used to route your computer to the right webserver.

OpenDNS doesn’t just give you the correct address for a website. It maintains a list of Phishing websites and redirects these to a safe page warning you about the site you were about to visit.

Of additional interest to me for its use at my work (and to parents who’s kids have access to the Internet) is that they don’t just categorise phishing websites, but they also have categories of adult and mature sites you can bar if you want (once you’ve signed up)

Took me a few minutes to setup (a little extra poking required at work, naturally). Very unintrusive – no software to install, just a couple of settings to change and they have lots of help pages on how to do that.

Tags: dns, free, security

Exchange Guid converter tool

In response to the amount of comments I’ve had (which are way way more than I was ever expecting!) on my Exchange Mailbox Recovery article, I’ve written a script to convert your guids from the bad format that exmerge gives you to the one thats required for updating the user account.

You can access it here. Please leave any feedback on this post.

Tags: code, Exchange, PHP, sysadmin

LastFM for Drupal

So, I’ve been playing with Drupal recently.

At first it did my head in, but then something sorta clicked. Not been near the Taxonomy module yet, but when I do I expect that process to reverse.

Anyway, I decided I needed a module that will allow users to show their LastFM stuff on their profile pages. I couldn’t find one so I wrote one.

I stared out with the Onlinestatus module as it did something very similar to what I was hoping to achieve.

Anyway, the module is attached should you feel so inclined. (Requires the profiles module I think. The one I based it on does anyway, so it probably does too.)

Download: lastfm.tar.gz

Tags: code, Drupal, lastfm, module, PHP

Photos in Active Directory

UPDATE:
The number one reason people come to this page is they want pictures in Outlook from the Global Address List.
It appears this is now possible using Outlook 2010 against Exchange 2010 as outlined by Ilse Van Criekinge in her Technet blog.

Here’s a couple of things I managed to cook up at work this week, again after spending an inordinate amount of time on Google looking for the answer and having to piece it together bit by bit.

The problem: how to store (and retrieve) staff photos in Active Directory. After the first twenty or so webpages I’d decided on using the jpegPhoto attribute. The secondary problem of getting the staff to submit to getting their pictures taken has already been solved by the new photopasses we’re all getting.
» Read the full post

Tags: Active Directory, code, sharepoint, vb.net, vbscript

Exchange 2003 Mailbox Recovery

Today I recovered a single mailbox from backup tapes on an Exchange 2003 server. The user had been deleted from Active Directory. The mailbox had passed the retention time on the server and been purged from the Exchange database.

I found very very minimal documentation on how to do this, it was so sketchy that I was almost afraid to try this.
We only have a single Exchange 2003 Standard server, and I believe that its a little bit simpler if you have Enterprise or more Exchange servers. So, for those of you in the same boat, here’s how to do it. » Read the full post

Tags: backup, Exchange, msExchMailboxGuid, obscure, recovery, symantec, sysadmin, veritas