Monday, November 23, 2009

HD is B-E-A utiful!

Took the plunge and got a HD LCD LED TV for myself( and the family) for Christmas.  Ended up getting an LG 42LH90. The picture quality is superb and the matte finish of the screen keeps the glare down. One of the coolest features of the TV is that it supports video files through the USB port on the side of the TV.  DIVX is the advertised compatible video format but if you check the manual you'll find a long list of supported file types.

Extensions:

mpg, mpeg, vob
dat
ts,trp,tp
mp4
avi
mkv
divx

Video Codec
MPEG1, MPEG2
MPEG1
MPEG2, H.264/AVC
MPEG4 SP, MPEG4 ASP, Divx 3.11, Dvix 4.12, Dvix 5.x
Dvix 6, Xvid 1.00, Xvid 1.01, Xvid 1.02, Xvid 1.03
Xvid 1.10–beta 1, Xvid 1.10-beta 2, H.264/AVC
MPEG 2, MPEG 4 SP, MPEG4 ASP, Divx 3.11, Divx 4, Divx 5, Divx 6
Xvid 1.00, Xvid 1.01, Xvid 1.02, Xvid 1.03, Xvid 1.10–beta 1
Xvid 1.10–beta 2, H.264/AVC
H.264/AVC, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4 SP , MPEG4 ASP
MPEG 2, MPEG 4 SP, MPEG4 ASP, Divx 3.11, Divx 4, Divx 5, Divx 6
Xvid 1.00, Xvid 1.01, Xvid 1.02, Xvid 1.03, Xvid 1.10–beta 1
Xvid 1.10–beta 2, H.264/AVC

Audio Codec
Dolby Digital, MPEG, MP3, LPCM
Dolby Digital, MPEG, MP3, LPCM
Dolby Digital, AAC, MPEG
Dolby Digital, HEAAC, AAC, MPEG, MP3,
LPCM
Dolby Digital, HEAAC, AAC, MPEG, MP3,
LPCM
Dolby Digital, HEAAC, AAC, MPEG, MP3, LPCM
Dolby Digital, HEAAC, AAC, MPEG,MP3,
LPCM
1920x1080P
@25/30P,
1280x720P
@50/60P
--------------------------------------------------------------

Frustrating thing is that it doesn't support DTS audio codec which is very popular especially in the packaged MKV videos.  If you really want to play an unsupported video type you can always hook up a home theater PC or (like me) use a laptop with an HDMI output and use VLC which works wonderfully.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

DNS = FUN

Two domains involved here.

Mydomain.com

theirdomain.com

mydomain.com has a secondary zone for theirdomain.com and vice versa.

Issue: If I do ping -a 10.100.19.26 or nslookup 10.100.19.26  ( theirserver.theirdomain.com ) from mydesktop.mydomain.com it returns

theirserver.mydomain.com

If I ping theirserver.mydomain.com it does not resolve because the record doesn't exist on mydomain.com . I can ping theirserver.theirdomain.com . From theirdesktop.theirdomain.com I can ping -a 10.100.19.26 and it comes back theirserver.theirdomain.com

I've checked our reverse DNS zone and there are no PTR records for theirserver.mydomain.com. Our reverse lookup zone does use WINS-R but there are no WINS records that match that server name or IP.

This same situation seems to occur on any machine in theirdomain.com . Where else can mydomain.com DNS be pulling this info from? We have a trust with theirdomain.com but I don't know of any reason that would affect DNS. I even checked out theirdomain.com DNS reverse lookup and forward lookup zones and there are no records that match theirserver.mydomain.com. The TCP/IP settings are the standard setup on theirserver.theirdomain.com, the DNS tab it has the Append primary and connection specific DNS suffixes with the box checked for Append parent suffixes of the primary DNS suffix. If I understand those settings correctly they should not affect this either.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Solution

A very smart friend of mine pointed out that DNS maps the authority of  a reverse look-up to the owners of the IP. Our reverse lookup zone does contain the IP of theirdomain.com . Even though there were no records in it, reverse lookups were resolving and defaulting to mydomain.com. I can manually create PTR records for the IP and assign it the theirserver.theirdomain.com name and BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE! Nslookup and ping -a resolve correctly after an IPCONFIG -flushdns and IPCONFIG -registerdns on my local machine.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Import Outlook email into Gmail

Need to move your Outlook email into Gmail? I give credit to this guys post but wanted to document it here as well.

This was only proven to work with Outlook and only for email that was in Outlook, but I would guess that any IMAP capable email application should work.
  1. Configure your Gmail account for IMAP.
    1. Logon to Gmail.
    2. Click "Settings" in the top right corner.
    3. Click the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab.
    4. In the IMAP Access section, select "Enable IMAP".
    5. Click the "Configure instructions" link to popup the IMAP configuration instructions in a new window for step 2.
    6. Click the "Save Changes" button.
  2. Configure your email application using the instructions from 1e above.
  3. Fire up your email application.
  4. Create folders in the Gmail account for your old email.
  5. Move the email from the old email folders to the Gmail folders and tada! J
This method retains all date info etc. and seems to be perfect! Enjoy…

Windows 7 Homegroup printing problems

Recently installed Windows 7 on a laptop and desktop computer at home. I really like the new Homegroups because they make sharing files so much easier. I had some issues getting my ancient HP LaserJet 5P printer installed though through the homegroup. I expected to maybe have to install it as a normal network printer so I ran the add printer wizard on the laptop after I had successfully installed the printer on the desktop where it's attached via a standard printer cable to the COM port.  The printer wizard couldn't find it. Luckily windows help was actually complete and helpful. Under why can't I print to my homegroup printer one of the tips mentioned this:

The printer has a non-USB connection and must be shared using Devices and Printers in Control Panel

Sure enough, I went to printer properties and shared the printer on the desktop and it just showed up on the laptop. I didn't even have to run the add printer wizard. Way to go MS on finally making home networking simple enough that an average user should be able to do it! Although I may live to regret that statement since I supplement my income by doing home tech support!

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Exchange 2007 Managed Folder policies on multiple users

This was a treat for me to find so I'm posting it in hopes it will help save others many valuable hours on google.

There are plenty of articles out there on how to set up Managed folder mailbox policies but my struggle was with how to apply them to a large amount of users in our organization. Typically we like to do things like this based on the Active Directory fields ( in particular the company field).

Here is the power shell command to accomplish this.

Get-Recipient -filter { company -like 'blah'} | set-mailbox -managedfoldermailboxpolicy "empty deleted items"

Another handy command to help you test this out is:

start-managedfolderassistant -mailbox username

Don't forget to schedule a time for the assistant to run. This is found under Server Configuration, Mailbox, Properties of your server, Messaging Records Management tab.

Exchange 2007 Public folder Migration

This year has been the year of the Exchange migration where I work. We're almost done and I'm in the process of making sure everything is off of our Exchange 2003 server. I had followed the instructions here for migrating the public folder store and all seemed well until I dismounted the old public folder store on our Exchange 2003 server and Outlook could no longer connect to public folders.

A little more detail about our setup first. We have E2K3FE, E2K3 backend ( where the old public folders were), E2K7 (CAS,HT), E2K7Mb1(where my mailbox is stored), and E2K7Mb2(where the new public folder store is located).

Further troubleshooting revealed that users with their mailboxes on E2k7Mb2 could open public folders fine with the old public folder store offline.  What I had missed was that I needed to update the Client Settings tab on the E2K7Mb1 mailbox store properties. This setting still had the E2K3backend server listed as the default public folder database. Once I updated that property on the mailbox DBs on the E2K7Mb1 server and restarted Outlook ( a couple times) everything was fine. Hope this post saves others the trouble I went through.