Windows Tip: When the Clipboard Dies

By Mitch Tulloch

Windows Terminal Services is generally a solid platform to use in enterprise environments but occasionally during a Remote Desktop Connection session, my clipboard has gone wonky. Here's a quick work around to the problem.

Unix Tip: Recovering from a fatal error: Lost libgen.so.1

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Unix vets know that it is possible to recover from fatal errors. A recent example is when a sysadmin accidentally zeroed out a file named /usr/lib/libgen.so.1. This file is used for string pattern matching and pathname manipulation. When you don't have this shared library on a system, you will get errors such as this.

Security tip: The ins and outs of e-mail vulnerability

According to an Aberdeen report on email vulnerability, 93% of responding organizations filter inbound e-mail for spam and viruses, but only 58% filter their outbound e-mail.

'Companies must scan their outbound email for malware as well as that coming in,' says Carol Baroudi, the report's author. 'Only scanning inbound mail is like asking your guests to wash their hands but not bothering to wash yours.'

Storage tip: Getting more performance out of high transaction-rate databases

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

What seems to be the problem? Your organization may have an on-line transaction processing (OLTP) system with a high transaction rate. High transaction rate databases may place a high I/O resource demand on performance that may result in response times outlined in the SLA not being met, batch jobs take too long, etc. You'll need a solution.

Here's what you need to know.

Unix tip: Scanning your messages file for warnings

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Too often we sysadmins look through our messages files only when something has gone wrong on our systems and we need some clues that might help us piece together what has happened. Routine scanning or, better yet, intelligent extraction and summarization of important notices and warnings can help alert us to problems when they make their first appearance and sometimes avoid the worst repercussions of a problem on your systems. This article looks at a script that scans for warning messages, collects the text and frequency of appearance of these warnings and presents this information in digested form to the user.

Read the full article here.

Windows Tip: Widening Outlook Search

By Mitch Tulloch

By default, when I type a search query into the Instant Search box in Outlook 2007, it searches the contents of the current folder only. So if I'm reading emails in my Inbox and I type the word "test" in the search box, the search results will display any emails in my Inbox that have the word "test" in the subject, in the From field, or in the message body.

What if I want to find such messages in any message folder and not just my current folder?

Unix Tip: Replacing batteries on a Sun StorEdge disk array

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld

I had only recently come to notice that the batteries had expired. Using the sccli (StorEdge controller command line interface) command, I had noted the expiration dates were well enough in the past that replacing them as soon as possible was a good idea. When I checked the batteries, the battery status information looked like this:

Three tips for improving IT risk management

IT risk incidents damage corporate reputations, expose weaknesses in firms management teams, rob profits, and dampen competitive advantage. What's an IT executive to do? Here are 3 tips for improving IT risk management in your enterprise.

Windows Tip: Defragmenting large volumes

By Mitch Tulloch

Defragmenting disk volumes regularly is important for ensuring optimal performance of your storage subsystem, but what if your volumes are really large? Today, it's common for even desktop systems to have volumes that are hundreds of gigabytes in size, and volumes on servers can often run into the terabyte range. And if you have a storage area network (SAN), you may be dealing with even large volumes. Can the built-in Windows defragmenter handle such large volumes? In theory, probably, but in practice, maybe not.

Read the full article here.

How CIOs Can Negotiate CEO-like Pay

There is a lot more to compensation these days than straight salary. There are perks. There are incentives. CIOs should know the lay of the land before they negotiate.

Read the full article here.

Cleaner VoIP

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

When a Voice over Internet Protocol user complains about a poor connection, what do you do? Most check the network for dropped packets or other errors, find no problems, and tell the user to stop mumbling.

Enter Psytechnics (.com), a company dedicated to measuring responses of both packets and the people relying on those packets for their conversations. It doesn't matter if the packets are happy if the users aren't.

Read the full article here.

Storage Tip: Protecting PCs against logical data protection problems

Snapshot technology is one approach to solving the logical data problem.
A snapshot creates a virtual copy of a disk volume at a designated point
in time. At the time the snapshot is taken the original disk image and
the snapshot are identical. Thus no additional physical space is
required at that instant. The original data and snapshot diverge as
writes change the original data.

Read the full article here.

Unix Tip: Looking at soft partitions

Soft partitions provide a way to squeeze more than seven partitions onto a single disk on a Solaris system. First introduced into Solaris as a patch for Solstice DiskSuite on Solaris 8 and then bundled into Solaris 9 as a feature of Solaris Volume Manager, soft partitions provide a way to make more flexible use of the increasingly large disks showing up on Solaris servers. Prior to soft partitions, the maximum of seven partitions often had sysadmins weighing tradeoffs when setting up their systems. Which file systems demand separate slices and which can share disk space without running into problems? With soft partitions, sysadmins can pretty much set up as many partitions on a disk as they care to configure. If you are looking at the soft partitioning on a Solaris server for the first time, you may find the information concerning the configuration of soft partitions a little hard to digest.

Read the full article here

Windows Tip: Rebuilding the Outlook search index

If you're using Outlook 2007, and searching for a contact in the Outlook
Contacts list, and coming up empty, try rebuilding the index on your
machine. It worked for me. Here's how.