Windows Server 2012 slide login

Sick of that annoying touch-drag motion that makes sense on tablets, but not so much with a mouse that you are forced to perform before logging in to Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8? It turns out the spacebar will skip this screen. There's probably a way to disable the swipe to login on these newer versions of the operating system, but this work around seems efficient enough that I didn't bother looking for it.

Fix Office File Associations for All users

I ran into a strange problem today. I installed Office 2007 Standard on a Windows 7 machine in the same way as I've done hundreds of times. For some reason something went awry this time. Any user other than the admin user, which I used to install the program, had Wordpad set to open all Office documents. Admittedly I only tested three other user accounts but all indications were that this would affect everyone. Since the Default Programs in Windows are set on a per user basis I couldn't very well just fix the associations manually. Instead I found the solution in an under-appreciated comment on this thread:

"Running winword /r corrected a similar issue I was having." - appdce

winword in this case is of course winword.exe which is located in the Office12 directory (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\winword.exe). Running this command once with an unprivileged user seemed to clear up the file associations for all users. Thanks appdce, wherever you are!

Ping with timestamp in Windows

Since I've had to look this up on a number of occasions I know others must too. It's a common problem: you need to leave ping running to catch elusive network failures but you need to know not just if but WHEN the network failed. There's as many solutions as there are threads but I feel that a program called fping offers the best solution to the timestamp problem (and a bunch of other nifty features as well). For instance unlike with normal ping simply redirected to a file, fping can log to a file while displaying console output. Nifty!

Run Cisco ASDM client on x64 machine

The official Cisco solution is to only use the web client, but this workaround seems to solve the issue. The Cisco ASDM launcher is configured to use javaw.exe inside c:\windows\syswo64\ but this path causes the connection to hang and never connect.

1. Install ASDM normally - From the interface at https://192.168.1.254:444
2. Edit a shortcut - I tend to create a shortcut from the start menu item onto the desktop. Right click and select properties. Change the Target path to use javaw.exe inside Program FIles for example:

"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_21\bin\javaw.exe" -Xms64m -Xmx512m -Dsun.swing.enableImprovedDragGesture=true -classpath lzma.jar;jploader.jar;asdm-launcher.jar;retroweaver-rt-2.0.jar com.cisco.launcher.Launcher"

The client will now work as expected. You're welcome.

Get Dell Service Tag Remotely

I recently needed to know the service tag of a remote machine. I found this article which gave me the simple instructions which follow:

1. RDP into remote machine.
2. Open command prompt.
3. Enter: wmic bios get serialnumber

Now get with Dell and get your system fixed!

Exclude a single user from a Dynamic Distribution Group in Exchange 2007

By default the Exchange Management Console only shows a fairly limited view of the filtering possibilities for generating Dynamic Distribution Groups. The PowerShell based Exchange Management Shell can be used for much finer grained control of these group filters.

1. Open EMS - Open the start menu and type exchange. Select Exchange Management Shell.
2. Enter the following command: Set-DynamicDistributionGroup -Identity "Group Name" -RecipientFilter {((RecipientType -eq 'UserMailbox') -and -not(Name -like 'Display Name'))}
3. Double check the new filter - Open the filters pane of the group properties in EMC and check that it was updated correctly.

The filter pane in the group properties will now show the full filter rather than the simplified checkbox display.

Shake Your Toner Cartridge

In a story entirely unrelated to the Harlem Shake I was recently almost out of toner on an unbranded cartridge for my Dell 1700n laser printer. Without the time or the resources immediately available to acquire a replacement I opted to just take the cart out, shake it back and forth for ~10 seconds and reinsert it. Voila! >300 prints later and it's still going strong, strong enough that you'd never know it was low on toner. I'm sure it'll still need replacing soon, but as a temporary stopgap I couldn't be happier.