today i saw a new version of linux mint was announced. i had linux mint 13 installed in a VM and went to look for an easy GUI upgrade utility. interesting enough, there doesn’t appear to be one. after some googling around it appears that the linux mint community recommends upgrading by CD.

that’s kind of lame. however, you can still go about the unrecommended method of upgrading by:
editing /etc/apt/sources.list and swapping out the release names of mint and ubuntu to the latest
then
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade 

update 11/21/12 (later in the day):
the apt-get dist-upgrade method worked fine except for one snag. apt-get got hung up on installing the kernel shipped with mint 14. evidently mint 14 has dropped support for non-pae cpus. so i shutdown the VM and enabled PAE (on the VM) booted back up and resumed the upgrade.

i’ve known for a while that in windows server 2008 and above you could use diskpart to extend a volume (no 3rd party partition app required).
the method i’ve used before:
diskpart
select volume <volume #>
extend
exit

however, earlier in the week i witnessed ben using this:
diskpart
select volume <drive letter>
extend
exit

and i find that much quicker/easier to do than the above .

to grant delegate access to a resource mailbox you actually don’t use the delegates feature (which threw me off). instead you simply grant the user full access to the mailbox (Add-MailboxPermission <resource> -AccessRights FullAccess -User <user>)

source (this article tells you everything you need to know about resource mailboxes):
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/05/14/3402515.aspx

update 4/22/2013:
there’s a little more to setting up room resources than i had originally thought. for a “delegate” to receive emails on appointment requests for a room resource the “always forward to delegates” option must be enabled. also the following needs to be ran:
Set-MailboxCalendarSettings <resource> -ResourceDelegates <user>

and
Get-MailboxCalendarSettings <resource> | FL
is very useful for checking current resource settings.

to alter resource settings graphically, login to OWA with an account that has access to the room resource mailbox then Open Other Mailbox <resource>. then goto Options then Resource Settings.

finally, the room resource calendar can be easily viewed from Outlook by going to Calender and then Open Calendar->Open Shared Calendar <resource>

in vcenter 4.x, i’ve occasionally received a warning when moving certain vms to a resource pool. the warning states that the vm “will be entitled to 0% of the cpu resources in the pool”.

when i’ve seen this warning in the past it has made me think twice about putting that particular vm in the pool. also i end up doublechecking to make sure there’s no hard resource limits on the actual vm itself (there never are any).

so today i googled the warning message and it turns out that it’s an incorrect warning AKA a bug. so nothing to worry about.

source:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1018360

this site very easily generates the javascript code to do so:
http://feed2js.org/

not only need to install the IIS role but also the following IIS features:
asp.net, windows authentication, dynamic content compression, and IIS 6 management compatibility
source:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverwsus/thread/4e4756ea-136c-4272-9181-b7153904487e/

default update types to synchronize:
critical updates, definition updates, security updates

critical and security updates are default set for auto approval

1 synchronization per day default

installing wsus creates two local groups: wsus administrators, wsus reporters

wsus hardware requirements based off client capacity:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708483(v=ws.10).aspx
single CPU and 2GB of RAM seems reasonable for most environments.

controller unit E310fD (fibre channel, dual controllers)
JBOD unit J310sD (dual controllers)
1 controller unit can have up to 4 JBOD units attached to it.

WebPAM default IP address: 10.0.0.1
default credentials: administrator, password

also the rails on these things are terrible. the only plausible way to mount them is to take all the drives and other removable components out of the array and then have at least 2 people help guide the unit into the rail guides.

i’ve been using 12.10 for two days now. i haven’t noticed much difference yet besides the following:
kompozer has been removed from the repository (possibly because it doesn’t seem to be maintained)
some application launcher icons on the gnome classic panel are not being displayed properly (size scaling of the icon is off)
gnome’s archive manager is crashing randomly when i attempt to use it. i imagine this one will get fixed soon.

those are all negative items. a positive item is that chromium has been upgraded to a newer release and appears stable. the last chromium update in 12.04 caused the browser to randomly crash for me.

update 11/5/2012:
installed system updates today that seem to have resolved archive manager crashing. evidently this was an upstream gnome issue.

EFS on file servers:
can’t use groups for access
also appears that you cannot set access on an encrypted folder, only on individual files
user who encrypts the file(s) chooses who has access to the file(s)

for a remote file server to host EFS files, the file server’s computer account in AD must be trusted for delegation.
for encrypted files on a share to be decrypted the file server will need to have a user profile of each user that wants to decrypt and a local copy of their private keys.
the only way on around this is the use of roaming profiles.

there is an EFS command line tool called cipher.exe that i haven’t tried out as of yet…

various info:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.05.howitworks.aspx

i just found this out today and have no idea how long it was possible to do this. files/folders can be shown on the KDE desktop by right-clicking the desktop and choosing  Desktop Settings->View->Layout->Folder View.

this is something i’ve whined about forever.

also if you right-click the KDE application launcher you can choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style” to get a traditional Start Menu type launcher.

source:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/433464-kde-files-folders-desktop.html