RedKittenMac. Windows. Networking. Wireless. Internet.

Sometimes you’ll find that a user requests a Firefox Add-On in a managed environment, or perhaps you need to send out a Firefox extension to multiple users at once. Because installations are on a per-user basis, often you can’t just install the Add-On as the user due to Group Policy settings and permissions, but if you log on as an Administrator that will install the extension for them rather than the original user. There is a way around this though!

We’ve just about finished a new website design for Lady Penelope Cars, just going through some final testing. It’s a WordPress installation with a customised theme, based on WP-Slimmity. What do you think?

Lady Penelope Cars provide wedding car hire services in Bradford, West Yorkshire – if you’re looking for a wedding car, check them out!

Sometimes when uploading to a document library in SharePoint, files will mysteriously time out or else give a cryptic error such as ‘Folder not found’ on Vista or Windows 7. These can occur despite the fact that you’ve changed the maximum upload sizes for SharePoint in Central Administration. The error messages aren’t particularly helpful, to say the least. There are a number of articles out there about changing the IIS connection timeout, etc but they didn’t work for one of our clients. After a bit of digging, we managed to resolve the issue for them – here’s how we fixed it.

If you can’t get into the Symantec Anti-Virus Reporting server, you may have locked out the admin account – don’t worry, this is a relatively easy thing to resolve if you have the username. If you’re working with a client, they may have no idea what the username was either – don’t fret, we can fix that too if you have the SA password. If you don’t have the SA details either then there is still hope!

Sometimes you’ll find it is necessary to stop a service in Windows, but using the normal GUI method fails as the service gets stuck on ‘Stopping’ and never stops. When this happens, you are unable to start the service again. This happened to a client today with their Websense Filter Service, and here’s how we resolved it – the same method works for other services too.

Recently a client asked us if we could assist with a migration to WordPress – no problem, we love it! We think that it is the best platform around for managing a small or medium website. As the client already had an existing site, they wanted to set up a WordPress site without changing their domain across yet so they could migrate their content, test some themes, etc. By default, installations using QuickInstall via cPanel will setup WordPress using the domain name of the account – see the problem? How do you do this when you’re not ready to migrate the domain? Read on!

Recently we had an issue where a client wanted to find out who had changed the security permissions on a SharePoint site. The first thing to check is that auditing is enabled – go to Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site Collection Audit Settings and tick the required boxes. If this isn’t enabled already, then you’re out of luck.

In this case, the boxes were ticked but when they tried to access the reports they were told ‘Error: The template could not be found for the specified report.‘ 

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is an extremely useful tool for managing Hyper-V and VMWare ESX servers. There is a trial version available from Microsoft in the form of a virtual hard disk (VHD) which you can use to create a new virtual machine with a 180 day evaluation copy already installed. Sounds good, right? Well I thought so too, but I found there were a few issues to resolve before I could use it successfully.

Like many people, a client wanted to import their Active Directory users into SharePoint on a regular schedule. This is easy to configure, but by default the import will bring all the user accounts across – this includes service accounts, test users, and even disabled users. They were using the People Directory webpart from Content and Code, which meant that these users were being displayed in the directory – not what they wanted.

Another quickie – you know sometimes your SharePoint site gets broken, perhaps from a web part not functioning correctly? You know, when you get that helpful error message ‘An unexpected error has occurred’. Isn’t it annoying when you can’t get onto the page in order to access the Site Settings?

There is a simple way to get there though, it’s pretty well known but I’ll post it here anyway in case it helps someone.