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Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

Information Technology

[Stupidity] re-enable a disabled local administrator account in Windows

Posted in Information Technology, Tips & Tricks on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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I was stuck when I was setting up a Windows server 2003 machine this afternoon. After I loaded pretty everything on the machine, I created another user account named support and disabled local administrator account, and log off. Ooops, did you see anything missing here?

Yes, I forgot to add the support account to the local administrators user…

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[VMware] vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide Released

Posted in Information Technology on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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Here comes more reading for you if you are planning upgrade your VMware infrastructure to vSphere 4 (now with update 1) near in the feature. If you are a VMware administrator, you are highly encouraged to download and check it out.

The guild is currently in public draft, called Rev B, and contains 6 sections…

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Tools for troubleshooting WSUS weirdness

Posted in Information Technology, Tools on January 22nd, 2010 by Kent

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It should work but doesn’t always. Sometimes you just scratch your head wondering why this computer didn’t get update automatically from the WSUS server as you configured. Now, there is a tool set from Microsoft TechNet that makes you troubleshoot the WSUS weirdness a bit easier.

There are 6 tools for 6 purposes in this…

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Install Ubuntu Linux inside Windows without partitioning the hard drive

Posted in Information Technology on January 20th, 2010 by Kent

image The How-To Geek had a how-to article about this, which looks quite interesting. It may be not new to those who already knew or use Ubuntu but to me, a windows-stubborner, it seems to be appealing.

Reading through the steps made me to think that it’s a lot like Windows 7 native VHD…

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Fixing HTTP Error 500.19 when setting up IIS in Windows 7

Posted in ASP.net, Information Technology on January 19th, 2010 by Kent

I was preparing my development environment on my Windows 7 yesterday. I loaded Visual Studio 2008, enabled IIS, and pointed it to my apps directory. All look good until I converted one app I coded before to application and tested it through my web browser.

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Zoom it out to see the detail errors if you can’t read it…

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How to offline join Windows 7 to Windows Server domain

Posted in Information Technology on December 18th, 2009 by Kent

The new combination of Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 makes a lot of new things that are impossible to do in the previous versions possible. Offline domain join is one of them. It becomes possible because of the new command tool, djoin.exe, that comes with the system. Actually, what makes more interesting is that it doesn’t require Windows…

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Is Oracle database better than MS SQL? Here are the different thoughts

Posted in Information Technology on December 18th, 2009 by Kent

I am not among those experienced DBAs. I am just a regular geek who knows basic skills of managing database server and a bit of database programming. I haven’t really got into Oracle world but have heard from many sources that Oracle database is way better than MS SQL because such, such reasons. And I have been wondering if that’s…

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Email failed to deliver to certain domains with an SMTP protocol error occurred message

Posted in Information Technology on December 13th, 2009 by Kent

It happened lately in my office that emails sent to certain domains first got delayed and then failed with a SMTP error code 4.4.7 in the final NDR. Error code 4.4.7 usually indicates that the message in the queue has expired and usually the problem is on the receiving server. However, that is obviously not the case this time. Also…

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How to remove duplicate records from a table in SQL database

Posted in Information Technology on December 10th, 2009 by Kent

Scenario 1, one record is completely identical to another

Meaning that there is no way of identifying them who is who. Usually, it happens when the table doesn’t have a unique id field due to the poor database design. Because of that, there is no way in SQL to delete one of these duplications without deleting them all first.

You…

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Running Chrome OS on VMware Player 3.0

Posted in Information Technology on December 2nd, 2009 by Kent

Google released the source code of their upcoming Chrome OS, and claimed that the official release of this Operation System won’t happen until next year 2010. So now, if we want to taste the goodies that Chrome OS brings to us, we would have to build Chromium OS from the source first. Luckily, several developers out…

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