In a Comment on my Article “Installing Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mini PCI“, Florian asked how to Install Dell’s R298998 driver on non authorized system and card combinations.

I decided to have a look and downloaded this driver. The structure isn’t much different from the R251153 driver I described in my earlier post.

When installing it on a non authorized card/laptop combination the error is similar:

When the error message appeared I looked into the temp folder and I noticed that just like before 2 folders were created (with a GUID as name). One of these folders contained the file driver_auth.exe which, as I already knew, performs the actual validation.

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Today one of my collegues asked me to write a script that performs two actions for all users of a certain Organizational Unit:

1. Ensure that each user has modify permissions on their homefolder
2. Make each user visible in the Exchange Address List.

Sounds like a PowerShell job right?

I reused my function to set NTFS Permissions by SID:

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For a script I needed to create an AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) Query that contained a date range.

An example of such is a range is: date:11/05/04..11/10/04

However we need to account for regional settings where for example the data seperator and the order of day and month may be different.

In my example I wanted to match any data that is 30 days or older so let’s do this in PowerShell:

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Yesterday I needed to set a few registry keys remotely from a 32 bit windows machine to a 64 bit machine.

I used reg.exe to set the key but even though it returned success the key wasn’t altered.

As I suspected the key was written to the Wow6432Node. In the help I couldn’t find any switch to force reg.exe to use the 64-bit view.

On a 64 bit machine this is not a problem since both 32- and 64 bit versions of reg.exe exists. The 32 bit version of reg.exe defaults to the 32 bit view and the 64 bit version defaults to the 64 bit view.

But luckily reg.exe has a switch (that is not listed in the help) to force the View:

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In Windows 7 and 2008 R2 all IP Addresses are by default registered in DNS.

If you don’t want certain IP addresses to appear in DNS you can alter this behavior with Netsh using the skipassource flag.

Use the following syntax to add an additional IP Address with skipassource flag:

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I came across an interesting tool today called Binwalk.
Binwalk is a firmware analysis tool that scans a given binary file for embedded files and executable code.

Binwalk requires a Linux machine, I used the Backtrack VM I used from my article about WEP keys.

Note there is no binary distribution of Binwalk so you will need to compile it but this is a breeze.

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Another interesting Move Mailbox error and in this case I am really unsure how this would be possible!

Let’s look at the Move Mailbox log:

This error occurs because of a size constraint just like the one in the previous part.

But the strange part is that it seems to be a PST file (type IPM.Document.PSTFile) located in the Root folder of the Exchange mailbox (which is not possible AFAIK).

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The previous part (part 3) addressed Mailbox Size but did you know that even Message Size (or rather Item size) can prevent a successful move as well?

Here’s an example move mailbox log:

As you can see in the log this mailbox there is one item with a size of 72 MegaBytes.

Let’s see this in Outlook:

It gets even worse when we open the Message:

It was addresses to several internal recipients and as you know Exchange 2010 no longer supports Single Instance Storage.

In Part 2 I showed some details about Mailbox Rule corruptions that can disturb Mailbox Moves.

For this part the topic is Mailbox size, which can be an important factor in deciding which mailboxes you want to move first.

In my case the mailbox size was important because we agreed to move smaller mailboxes during the day but larger mailboxes only outside working hours.

For Exchange 2010 mailboxes it’s very easy to obtain the size using PowerShell.

Example:

But how can we get the Mailbox Size for Exchange 2003 mailboxes?

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Sometimes I want to process a list of “things” easily in PowerShell where the list is not in an external file but in the script itself.

Ideally this list would not be separated by e.g. a comma so it can be easily copy/pasted from external data sources.

Something like this:

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