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The famous Indian techknowlegy site, labnol has announced a giveway offer for it’s readers. HP is going to present  wireless printers to the three winners, so hurry up and grab your printer, if you are luckey enough!

Visit this labnol link to get more details about this offer.

If you want to get your hands into the new Google Chrome OS, here you go.

Download the VMDK file(compatible with Vmware Server/workstation/fusion) from here and setup your own instance.

Below are the some of interesting notes about Google OS  [ Courtesy : Manan's Blog].

• It will be launched next year (they wanted to cash in on Microsoft’s PDC09. Cheapos!)
• It’s ONLY meant for Netbooks.
• The OS looks exactly like the Chrome browser.
• It’ll be locked to the hardware, like Apple the OS will come bundled on Netbooks.
• It is an Open Source project and bits are available for developers now.
• It is based on Debian. It’s basically just another Linux distro.
• Everything you do will be stored online. Notes and documents will be synced to Google Docs.
• No native applications.
• The current build can be compiled and installed on any machine.
• An App store is likely & no word on weather it will support Android apps, nothing certain but maybe.

At present there are not much application available in Google OS to play with. But look like developers already started their work to bring their apps Chrome compatible. The thing I like abou this is, you need to use your gmail ID for login(I think Google Apps IDs also will work, but haven’t tried) and it becomes one dash board for all google realted services.

Write in comments section if you find any other interesting news about Google OS.

Windows 7 brought lot of features for users and easy options for administrators. If you ever want to copy a file/folder patch in windows 7, just hold SHIFT button and right click on that file/folder. It will give an option called “Copy as Path”, select that and it takes the file path into windows clip board and paste it where ever you want. It pretty pretty easy than conventional method of copying from address bar(or from file/folder properties)

Do you know a tip/trik in Windows 7 and want to share that? Put it here it in comments with a link to your blog.

If you want to find-out the SID of a Domain(or local) user using powershell, here is the code.

Get the SID of domain User:

write-host (new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount “domainuser”).Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) -b yellow -f red

Get the SID of local User:

write-host (new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount “administrator”).Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) -b yellow -f red

If you are a programming geek and want to convert this into cmdlet(say get-sid), you can find some info here at http://www.clariusconsulting.net/blogs/pga/archive/2006/08/08/643.aspx
Happy Learning,

Sitaram Pamarthi

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This is a general problem one will face when they use external USB storage. Most of the USB mass storage vendors, packs their disks with FAT32 formatting (not sure why). This limits us from copying a file which is more than 4GB. It’s a limitation with FAT32 partition. Another thing I noticed is, we cannot copy more than 100GB into a FAT32 formatted USB drive though the drive capacity is more than 100GB.

So, if your USB storage disk of any size more than 100GB, I prefer formatting it with NTFS before you really use it. If you already have some data in it, and cannot really copy it to somewhere for formatting, you can give a try with “covert” command which coverts your USB drive to NTFS from FAT32 without losing data. Try at your own risk, I cannot guarantee. Chose this utility if you really don’t care or don’t have a place to back up your data

Happy Learning,
Sitaram Pamarthi

This I learned today.

I really liked the way Microsoft designed it. The procedure outlook 2007 uses for connecting to it’s nearest CAS server is something similar to DCLOCATOR process in Active Directory. When you install a Exchange 2007 CAS in a forest, it creates a SCP (service connection point) in Active Directory. The no. of CAS SCPs is directly proposal to no. of CAS servers you have in Exchange organization. That means, each exchange CAS role installation creates a SCP in active directory. This SCP object will have information about auto discovery URL (ex: https://cas01.yourdomain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml) and the active directory site name to which CAS server belongs to along with other parameters. This site information plays key role in making outlook 2007 connect to it’s nearest CAS server. Go through the below steps for process outlook 2007 follows for connecting to Auto Discovery Service.

• Outlook 2007 sends a LDAP request to Active Directory for list of CAS SCPs
• Outlook 2007 divides the received list of CAS servers into two lists namely, “in-site” list and “out-of-site” list of CAS servers. The “in-site” list is the one which has CAS servers belongs to Active Directory site from where Outlook 2007 is initiated and “out-of-site” list will have remaining all CAS servers in Exchange organization.
• After sorting the “in-site” list, outlook starts connecting to each CAS server through Auto Discover URL. It goes to next server if incase of errors with first one. Like this it completes the list until it finds a responding server. If none of the servers are responding, it will sort the “out-of-site” list by SCP creation order and tries to connect to them one by one until it finds a responding server.
• The outlook will continue to fetch free/busy, OAB, and other information if it finds a CAS server which is online.
• In case of failures of above attempts, outlook will try by connecting to predefined URLs(https://autodiscover. yourdomain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml or https:// yourdomain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml) using DNS name resolution. If it still fails, it tries to query using SIP DNS records and it cannot do any more if that also fails J

Refer to white paper on Exchange Discovery service to know more about it.

Happy Learning..,

Sitaram Pamarthi

There are many tools available over internet to record the activities done in interactive windows screen, but for the first time, I came across a utility which can record all RDP sessions in a windows server and play the recorded sessions when you want. The most exciting part of it is ..it’s FREE
J

Visit this link to download

Tags: record windows screen, record terminal services

I know, there are various methods and scripts available in web to get the list of domain controllers information in a domain. Still I want to write this post to present simplest way of doing it from a windows XP/Windows 2003 machine using my favorite command nltest.

Syntax: nltest.exe /DCLIST:<domain name>

Example : nltest.exe /DCLIST:pamarths.com

Here pamarths.com is my domain name and executing this will give DC name, and the site to which it belongs to. Please note that you need to install windows support tools package to get nltest command. You can do numerous other things with this command. I will write another post when I find some time.

Happy Learning…,
Sitaram Pamarthi