David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Bulk-create external email contacts in Exchange/Office 365

    Say someone asked you to create an exchange distribution group with a thousand new external email addresses. Well, back in the day, you’d download some shady utility off the web and cross your fingers hoping not to spend the rest of your day cleaning up a failed bulk import with ADSIedit. Well, with Exchange 2007…

  • Gmail App reporting incorrect unread count

    I don’t know why, but this has been driving me nuts. Thanks OCD. When I check my Gmail on using the App on IOS or Android, it reports that I have 3 unread messages in my inbox. No matter how far i scroll down in the inbox using the app, however no unread messages are…

  • Outlook 2013 and Lync 2013 suddenly cannot run at the same time

    If you’ve made the switch to Office 365 you may have had a relatively smooth ride since the they’ve moved things to Exchange 2013 and Office 2013. That said, nothing’s ever all roses all the time, am I right? Today a customer experienced an issue where suddenly Lync 2013 is no longer able to launch…

  • Shoretel is keeping Outlook from launching

    If you’re running the Shoretel Communicator and Outlook 2010/2013, you may have seen a situation where Outlook doesn’t launch and hangs at the splash screen stating “loading profile…”. This is actually caused by a small program named agent.exe that is part of Shoretel Communicator. This agent.exe program is designed to download contacts from your email…

  • Public folder 2gb limit in office365

    Office 365 has an undocumented issue with storage quotas on public folders. Office365 subscriptions offer 50GB of mailbox storage for public folders, but if you copy more than 2GB of data into a freshly created public folder within office365, you’ll get an error about the folder being full. Here’s how to resolve this issue: [step…

  • Four ways to remotely reboot a Windows machine

    As a sysadmin you will eventually have to deal with a system that has become unresponsive at the GUI. Fortunately, there are several ways to reboot a Windows PC from another windows PC or server on the network. Here are four of my favorite methods to do this: 1. The shutdown command. This is a…

  • Synergy keyboard doesn’t work on macbook pro

    I’ve written about Synergy in the past. Basically Synergy is neat software that allows you to extend the use of one computers mouse/keyboard to another computer. This can be useful if you want to add a notebook or an extra computer to your multi-monitor workstation setup and control it using your main computer’s keyboard and…

  • Create a virtual router to provide Internet access to a virtual LAN

    In this tutorial, I’ll be talking about connecting a virtual LAN network created using VirtualBox to a physical LAN segment with Internet access. The reason for this tutorial is to demonstrate that it is possible to create a virtual environment that closely mimics a production company LAN network in functionality. This includes being able to…

  • Show up-to-date server info on the desktop background of all your servers

    If you’re a sysadmin like me, you’ll have multiple RDP sessions to multiple servers open a the same time on occasion. They tend to look alike if you keep things standardized and this can introduce the risk of human error when it comes to maintenance. If all RDP sessions look the same, it can be…

  • Going back to search results and…nothin?

    In Firefox, when I go back to the Google search results page, I get blank Google search results. I do a lot of searching for my job and this drives me absolutely nuts. When it first started happening I looked around for a fix but there weren’t a lot of people complaining about the same…