David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

OS X Mail App does not allow creation of some E-mail accounts

Granted, some of the domain suffixes out there seem like they’re kind of on the fringe of being legit (.xxx, .wtf, .tattoo), but Apple has apparently decided that in OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite and others) you cannot add an exchange email account with an email address ending in some of those fringe suffixes. Either that,…

February 13, 2015
Office365 planning – don’t change the region

According to Microsoft customer support, to change regions on a Office365 subscription, you must backup and then destroy the entire subscription and all account data, then recreate it in the region you want to move to. Sound crazy? I thought so. Let’s take this example: You’ve got a large international firm with several offices around…

February 5, 2015
Office365 sharepoint: Sorry you are not allowed to share?

I’m not even going to go into the irony of this error. Let’s just get straight to the problem and how to resolve it, shall we? [the problem] You have a document in a private SharePoint site. When you try to share the document with an external email contact you get a messages saying: Sorry…

January 23, 2015
Reinstall Microsoft Office 2010 on a Dell

If you purchased a Dell with Microsoft Office pre-installed in the past few years, chances are all you got in the box was a Operating System recovery DVD and small paper card with the Microsoft Office product key on it. Should you find yourself in the situation where the systems hard drive has failed and…

December 29, 2014
Restoring a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller from a Windows Server Backup BMR image

This article is designed to showcase the process of restoring a primary domain controller running Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 server standard. In a previous article I described a cost effective way for small businesses to approach a data loss prevention (DLP) and/or backup disaster recovery (BDR) plan. Implementing any DLP/BDR strategy without testing is risky…

October 16, 2014
Calendar events added on phone don’t show in Outlook

With Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) options at an increasing number of workplaces, it’s become almost common practice to have your email, calendar and contacts on your personal device. It’s great for employers that want to get additional hours out of employees constantly tethered to their smart phones and it’s great for those employees who…

October 13, 2014
Excel 2010 ribbon tab unresponsive when opening spreadsheet

This is yet another reason file preview should never have been implemented in Windows explorer by Microsoft…though truth be told this bug has been resolved in later version of Office 2010 and Office 2013. Here’s the problem: After opening an xls or xlsx file, the ribbon at the top containing various commands named HOME, INSERT,…

October 10, 2014
Five steps to take for pretty good DL/DR protection

I see a lot of small businesses unprepared for data loss prevention and disaster recovery. Implementing a DLP/BDR plan can be a daunting task if you start searching for solutions via Google both in terms of scope and finances as well. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. I’m not saying that BDR and…

October 9, 2014
Dllhost has gone haywire because of poweliks

Dllhost.exe spawning multiple instances may seem suspicious but it is not necessarily a virus. Dllhost.exe is a wrapper application that is part of Windows 7 and can be used to run DLL files as applications and running some DLL’s as threads can be legit windows system activity. Last week, however, I had a workstation exhibiting…

October 2, 2014
VMWare guest time is incorrect

By default, VMWware ESX/ESXi hosts setup guest virtual machines to sync the time with the host (or hypervisor). This is great if you’ve remembered to set the host up to sync itself with an external Network Time Protocol (NTP) server or NTP pool like pool.ntp.org. If you forgot, however, then you can be in a…

October 2, 2014