Windows Tip: Scripting multiple Outlook windows

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Most knowledge workers in enterprise environments live by Microsoft Outlook. Email is so important for today's businesses that getting the most out of using Outlook is essential for job effectiveness.

One complaint I used to have about Outlook 2003 was that I could only open one copy of the program at a time. Double-click on the Outlook shortcut on the desktop, and an Outlook window opens. Double-click on the same shortcut again and nothing happens. This frustrates me because I could manage my email more efficiently if I could have multiple Outlook windows open, one displaying my general Inbox, another my Urgent folder where I route mail that's flagged as important, another my folder where I route mail for a big project I'm working on, and so on. It's great to be able to create rules in Outlook that will route incoming messages to whatever folders they should be directed, but I'd like to have these folders always visible on my desktop so I can easily see new messages arriving in each folder.

Here's a little script that helps you open multiple Outlook windows.

Storage Tip: Know your data types

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

Knowing your blood type is important for people; knowing your data types is important for IT. Decisions on how you protect your data, how you go about archiving it, and how you can best organize the data not only for its current uses, but also how to get more out of it (such as search) depend upon your understanding the data type. Yet IT organizations tend to lump data into only two types -- structured and unstructured. That is wrong. Those ordered bits we call data can come in three general types -- structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Understanding the difference among these three types is necessary because the storage administration for each of the three types differs.

Read the full tip here.

Unix Tip: More on associative arrays

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

An associative array, when implemented in Perl, has come to be known as a "hash" -- a word that is also used to describe the digested value (i.e., the "message digest") generated from a longer piece of text and used to ensure that the text has not been altered (if a message before
and after transmission results in the same hash, the text can assume to be unaltered).

This choice of the word "hash" for a seemingly unrelated use is not surprising when the function of a hash is considered. The value of each hash element is computed from its key in a manner that is not entirely dissimilar from the way in which message digests are computed from the text that they represent -- thus, the concept of computing a "hash" that leads to the proper data value for an element in the array.

Using the array from last week's column, the wavelength of various rainbow colors can be assigned to a hash in several different ways. In one of the assignments we looked at last week, the hash elements were set up in one command that incorporated key/value groups using separate lines to clarify the relationships between the color names and wavelength values:

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Windows Tip: Disk quotas and the recycle bin

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Here's a common scenario: A user has 25 MB of files on a quota-enabled volume, tries to free up space by deleting 5 MB of old files, checks the volume in My Computer and it still shows 25 MB of files, and calls Support to complain that something doesn't work. The problem? When the user deleted his files, they were simply moved to the Recycle Bin on the quota-enabled volume. The solution: educate users to either empty their Recycle Bin, hard-delete files using SHIFT+DELETE, or run Disk Cleanup.

Read the full tip here.

Storage Tip: Apply the third degree to data protection

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

How much data protection is enough? Think of each layer as a degree of protection and plan on a minimum of three degrees for any information that you definitely must protect. Here's how that may look like once you break it down.

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Tech Tips

Unix Tip: Using associative arrays in the Korn shell and perl
Windows Tip: Launching a low priority process
Storage Tip: How storage mergers and acquisitions affect you

Unix Tip: Using associative arrays in the Korn shell and perl
An associative array is an array that uses strings as indices instead of integers. To see how associative arrays work, we're going to look at both the Korn shell and perl, though only the newest version of the Korn shell (referred to as "korn93") supports associative arrays.

Windows Tip: Launching a low priority process
Problem: Launching a series of batch jobs on a Windows XP workstation from the command line by running a batch file that contained a series of commands like job5.exe -i input.dat. Unfortunately, these jobs hog so much of the machine's processing power that foreground tasks became unresponsive. Solution: If you need extra processing power, use the start command to launch jobs with low priority.

Storage Tip: How storage mergers and acquisitions affect you
The consolidation in the storage space has been ongoing for years and there is no reason to think that it will not continue. Although investors may debate the value of the deal and employees wonder about their futures, you as a customer wonder about how the deal will affect you.

Unix Tip: Using Indexed Arrays in the Korn Shell

By Sandra Henry Stocker

One of the most convenient ways to manipulate information in scripts is to store it in an array. Arrays facilitate looping through lists of related values, keeping track of an ever changing number of items and relating descriptive text with the items that they describe. As a very simple example, consider the colors of a rainbow. You can always loop through a list of rainbow colors like this...

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Security Tip: Top three web server vulnerabilities

By Brent Huston, MicroSolved, Inc.

A few weeks back, I wrote about old worms and attacks that were still propagating around the Net. I received feedback from folks who said that only in the last six months or so have they seen the death of the Nimda and Code Red worms for the most part. I did some checking and most of my systems now only get a Code Red hit about once a week or less, while Nimda hits have all but disappeared on most of my monitored network segments.

Read the full article here

Storage Tip: Continuous Data Protection to the Rescue

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

CDP solves a long-standard problem of how to provide logical data protection for applications that require low RTO/low RPO. However, enterprises may want to consider extending CDP to not-as-time-availability-sensitive applications as well if the variable cost for expanding coverage is not that expensive. The incremental improvement in end user and IT productivity through higher availability may well justify the additional cost. In general, low RTO/low RPO technology is likely to become very popular as a complement to existing data protection technologies.

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Windows Tip: Protecting Your Default Policies

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Always leaving yourself an out is good advice when it comes to playing poker, and it's a good idea when it comes to managing Windows networks too. Group Policy is one place where it's easy to back yourself into a corner. There are literally thousands of policy settings you can configure, and if you accidentally configure the wrong setting in your Default Domain Policy, you might end up with hundreds of phone calls to your support desk asking for help. That's because any change you make to your Default Domain Policy automatically affects every user on your Windows network.

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IPv6 Basics

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

IPv6 is coming. It's coming slowly, due to technologies like NAT and the advent of private address spaces like 10.0.0.0/8 and 192.168.0.0/16 that have provided breathing room for IPv4 in spite of the rapidly depleting IPv4 address space. Still, it is coming. And it's different enough from IPv4 that preparing for its arrival is a very good idea. In this week's column, we'll take a look at some of the fundamental differences between the two protocols and see what IPv6 addresses look like.

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Windows Tip: Using Remote Assistance in the Enterprise

By Mitch Tulloch

Have you ever been asked a computer question from a friend or family member who is located miles away? Wouldn’t it be great if you could see what they were trying to describe to you and show them how to fix the problem remotely? Remote Assistance, a feature of Windows XP, is a
great idea for troubleshooting issues that are hard to explain or which require a complicated series of steps to fix.

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Storage tip: When Is a Disaster Not a Disaster?

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

Distinguishing between a disaster and a non-disaster is easy. Anything that requires you to transfer access to using storage at a remote site is a disaster. Anything else is an operational problem. Making that distinction is important because the resources -- both in terms of equipment and personnel -- that you bring to bear on resolving the problem are different. Don't use a hammer when a screwdriver will do and vice versa. Continue...