Bauer-Power

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Open Source Alternative to AutoCAD
2008-03-25 18:23:00
Hey guys, I thought I would take a quick break from studying for Security+ to do a post. I found a really cool open source alternative to AutoCAD, which as you may or may not know is a really, really expensive design program. Companies use AutoCAD to design all sorts of things from machinery to buildings. The full version of AutoCAD costs upwards of $4,000. The light version of AutoCAD costs a measly $800. That may not seem expensive to you, but to me that is crazy expensive.Well, you all know me and what a cheap skate I am. I personally follow the motto, "If it is free, it is for me!" That especially goes for software. I am a big fan of freeware, and particularly open source software.This software is no different. I like it because it is free. It is called gCAD3D, and comes in flavors for Windows and Linux. From the website: gCAD3D has its own import-/ export-programs, integrated 3D-Open GL-viewer, programinterpreter for geometry and NC-commands in 3D, integrated NC-process...
More About: Open Source , Alternative , Source , Open-Source

Not Posting For A While
2008-03-20 22:18:00
Hey folks. You probably have already noticed that I have been slacking like crazy on Bauer-Power. I used to update daily, but recently only a few times a week. That, or I will bring up an older post to the top for you guys new to Bauer-Power.First of all, I am sorry I haven't had my head in the game. I have really been focusing on work and school lately so the blog has taken a back seat in my list of priorities. Now to add to the clutter, when I first started this blog I mentioned that I was studying for my Security+ certification. Well, this blog has seriously got me sidetracked from that goal and I blew off studying. I have decided to get back with it and start studying. That means I won't have a lot of time to write here.Now, I will still try to post when I can, so please keep checking back, but don't expect daily content as you just won't be getting it. If any of you out there have taken this test, let me know if you have any tips in the comments.

Spybot Search and Destroy...For Mobile?
2008-03-17 19:27:00
I am a big fan of Spybot Search and Destroy. This little freeware wonder has saved my butt a few times, and has even helped me make a buck or two. When I used to do home and small business IT consulting, 90% of my business was spyware and virus removal. Often times all I had to do was install Spybot on a home users PC and run it for a quick buck. Or I would burn it, along with some other free tools, and give it away as a "Bauer-Power Consultation Security Pack" for marketing purposes.Anyhoo, getting back on track, on Friday I was on the SpyBot website and noticed that they had versions of Spybot for Windows Mobile , Pocket PC, and Symbian devices. I didn't realize that spyware on mobile devices was that big of an issue requiring an Antispyware. Actually, I guess it isn't. According to the Spybot site, most malware for these devices is proof on concept right now, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared for the future.If you want to check it out for your device you can download them fro...

Stop Using Your Deleted Items as Another Storage Folder For Email!
2008-03-14 21:23:00
This is pretty much a rant post. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I am in the process of restoring mailboxes from our oldest email backups for an upcoming court case. So I have been busily working on this project for the last few days, and now I am restoring mailboxes. Half of the people I am restoring have gobs and gobs of email in their deleted items folder. WHY!?!?!?Isn't the purpose for having a deleted items folder is to have a place to put junk you don't want any more? Sure, I can see keeping stuff in there for a few weeks in case you have to restore an email you deleted, but after that...Dude, time to clean it out!This one particular mailbox I am restoring right now has over 4000 emails in it! Now keep in mind, this is before my company had mailbox limits, and policies to clean out deleted items after a while. Now if you want to keep it, the last place you want to put it is your deleted items because we will clean that for you. Back when this backup was done, we didn't hav...
More About: Email , Storage , Stop , Items , Folder

Looking To Save Hard Drive Space? Clean Out Your Duplicates!
2008-03-13 21:23:00
My wife, God love her, is a photographing dynamo. I think it all started when I bought her a new digital camera for Christmas two years ago. I really created a monster. Since then, I can't seem to keep my hard drive from filling up. When I look to see what is taking up all of the space it is her photos! But it isn't just that, sometimes she will make copies of her photos and put them in other directories so she can doctor them up in Photoshop, or Picasa. Often times, she will create more than just one copy.Now lets skip to my work, each office has a shared network drive, and each user has their own "home" drives. Often times, people will save both to their home directories and the shared directory. The users think they are separate drives, but in reality both directories take up the same storage space on the server.So what is the common thread with both of these stories? Duplicate files! That's right, storage wasting duplicates! My man Karl over at Ask The Admin touched on a cool...
More About: Space , Drive , Clean , Hard , Hard Drive

Creating Images with Drive Image XML
2008-03-13 07:00:00
I mentioned in a previous post that if you can use the Ultimate Boot CD for windows to create custom, deployable computer images similar to Symantec’s Ghost except it is 100% free. So what do I mean by images? Let’s talk about it for a minute. Let’s say you are in a room, and you have a Polaroid camera. You spin around the room taking pictures of every wall, every corner, every ceiling etc. Now, you take all those photos and save them in a shoe box for later. A week later your boss says that they need you to build another room just like the one you took pictures of. (Now keep in mind this is just an analogy), you have two options. You can run down to the hardware store buy a ton of building supplies, drywall, paint etc, and you can spend a few weeks or months building the requested room, or you can take all of those photos and glue them all together to make an exact replica of the room, and have it done in a few hours. Sure, that wouldn’t work in real life, but that is t...
More About: Drive , Images , Creating , Image

Ripping DVD's in Ubuntu
2008-03-10 15:59:00
For the longest time if I wanted to rip a movie in Ubuntu I would use DVD Decrypter that was installed using WINE. I just couldn't find a good enough open source Linux program that would do the trick. That is until yesterday.I have to admit, I did try this particular program before and it kept erroring out. This time, on Ubuntu 7.10, it worked like a charm! This program is called K9Copy. Much like DVD Shrink, it will rip the movie to your hard drive, then shrink it down to DVD5 format.Here are some of it's features from their website:The video stream is compressed to make the DVD fit on 4.7 Gb recordable DVD DVD BurningCreation of ISO imagesPossibility of selecting the audio tracks and subtitles to be copiedTitle preview (video only)Possibility of preserving the original menusI have tried other Linux rippers in the past. Many of them only rip to VCD format, or to mpeg and AVI. Still, others only rip the movie and leave out the menus. Some people like that. I on the other hand want...

Recovering A Domain Password
2008-03-06 23:02:00
Often times people will call a help desk because they have forgotten their password. I know this because I worked at help desk for three years and those kind of calls came all the time. In that type of situation, most help desk agents will just reset the password in active directory once they have verified the identity of the user calling in. Simple right?There are some times when you need to know that password, and not just change it. For instance, if the user has any encrypted files. By resetting the password as an administrator for a user, that can break the encryption key pair used to encrypt those files. So how does one obtain that users password?I know of one way. That way involves using a little gem of a program called pwdump2 and using the Rainbow tables on Plain-Text.info. I wrote about using Rainbow tables before a while back. It really is a fast way to crack passwords.What you need to do is, RDP into your domain controller with a domain administrator account. Download pwd...
More About: Domain , Password

Installing Backtrack Linux to a USB Thumb Drive
2008-03-05 22:37:00
A few months back, when I was doing to series on my Capstone class for school, I wrote about installing Backtrack Linux to your hard drive. For those not in the know, or for those that didn't read my article, Backtrack Linux is a Linux distro based off Slackware Linux, and is designed for pentesting, and hacking. It normally comes as a live CD, and is pre-packaged with all sorts of hacking tools and scanners.I don't know about you, but I don't like walking around with CD's in my pockets. They are just too cumbersome. What about a USB stick? Most of us, techie or not, carry around a USB flash drive now days right? I mean, they have pretty much replaced floppies, and CD's as the preferred method of transferring files via sneakernet.Since you already have a thumb drive in your pocket, why not install Backtrack Linux on that? It is really very simple. The following instructions were taken from PenDrive Linux.com:Download the USB BackTrack versionExtract the Boot and BT3 folders to ...
More About: Thumb , Thumb Drive

Entrecard Contest Results
2008-03-05 00:02:00
February is over, and that means so is my Entrecard contest. This was the first contest I have ever offered, and I have to say that I was pretty disappointed. Maybe it is because every other blog out there is offering an Entrecard contest, and so it has lost it's appeal? I don't know.Well I didn't have one winner, I had a tie (However I think it is the same blogger, just two different sites.) I tried contacting the blogger to ask if he definitely owns both domains, but he never responded back. That leaves me no choice but to split the 1000 Entre Card credits between the two sites. Here are the winners (by blog URL):Parent Life - 500 Entre Card CreditsTop Entre Drops - 500 Entre Card CreditsWait, this just in, I just checked the blogger's profile, and he certainly does own both sites, therefor it is really one winner. His name is Andy!Congrats!
More About: Contest , Results

Security Policies and Procedures
2008-03-02 21:46:00
I am in the final weeks of a security policies and procedures class in college. We have three final projects to do before the end of the course. The current project I am working on is developing security policies and procedures for a small business. I decided to go it easy and develop a policy for a fictitious small, local non-profit consisting of five employees, and five volunteers. Only the five employees have computers, and they all share on small business server. Simple right?Well anyway, one of the things my professor said was that we do not have to re-invent the wheel with these procedures. That is great news because there are tons of examples online for all sorts of policies and procedures for information security. One of them I want to share with you.If you ever have to write security policies for your company, I highly recommend checking out SANS. They have a plethora of pre-written policies for information security. Often times they are very generic, and easily customizabl...
More About: Security , Policies

Reading RSS Feeds On Your Blackberry
2008-02-29 17:19:00
I really haven't been all that into RSS personally until recently. Sure, I have my Google Reader set up with a ton of RSS subscriptions, but I rarely went through it. It isn't that I don't like RSS honestly. I think it is a great idea! I mean instead of having to go out to all of your favorite sites to look for updates, you go to your reader, and check for updates all in one place. I once even did a blog post about it here (What is RSS?).Well since I got my Blackberry things have changed. I installed an RSS reader on my Blackberry pearl, and I find myself reading it all the time. For instance, I went to get my hair cut last night. All the Great Clips had to read were chick magazines like Cosmopolitan, inTouch, and People. I decided I would forgo the scandal rags, and pull out my Blackberry Pearl to catch up on some of my favorite blogs like Ask The Admin, Geeks Are Sexy, Joe Tech, Android Guys, etc. It really made the time go fast while I was waiting to get my ears lowered a bit....
More About: Reading

Creating Email Web Forms On The Easy
2008-02-28 21:32:00
Yesterday one of my readers had a problem leaving a comment on one of my posts. The problem was caused because I was using a feature of Blogger Draft to write a post then have it auto publish at a specified time. The problem with that is that it didn't automatically create a unique URL, and thus caused my Intense Debate comments to break for that post.Well, this reader was obviously frustrated by this error and wanted to let me know about it so I could fix it. He looked around my site for a place to email me, but I never published my email (I am not a fan of spam). He eventually found a working comments section and that is how he notified me. He was right though, so I went ahead and made a Contact Me section. To do it, and to prevent getting spammed, I decided to use a web form. I wanted some protection so I created my form using Email Me Form. They give you protection by adding a captcha at the bottom, and also hiding your personal email address. Also, when you go get emails, they ...
More About: Creating , Easy , Forms

Converting Media Formats Like A Pro
2008-02-27 17:08:00
I am always in the market for conversion software. I can't count on one hand how many times I have had to convert one file format into another for various tasks. I write about it all the time. For my old Samsung phone I had to convert MP3 files to 3GP for instance.I just found a new cool tool that does some sweet media converting. Specifically audio and video file formats. Okay, maybe it's not all that new, but it's new to me and to you also if you have never heard of it!This tool is called simply Media Coder. Here is a quick break down of it's features:Convert to and from many audio and video compression formats and re-multiplex into various container formats in batchesFull control over transcoding parameters, you can learn about audio/video encoding and play with various codecsStrong decoding capability for partial or corrupted contentsSimplified UI for popular mobile devices (e.g. PSP, iPhone/iPod) Fully standalone, no dependance on system codecs/splitters Extension (scripting...

Saving Your Waterlogged PDA/Phone
2008-02-26 17:24:00
At my last company we had this one lady who shall remain nameless that used to drop her PDA cell phone in the toilet every other month. Funny, it always happened when we were issuing newer models of cell phones.A few months back my buddy Karl talked about one method of saving your PDA phone on Ask The Admin. In his method, you remove your battery, and dry off your phone and battery with a towel, then place both in a bag of rice. You then leave the bag of rice complete with phone in sunlight, or another warm/dry place for about 24 hours. (Karl, if you are reading this, can you post a link to your article in the comments? I couldn't find it). I haven't tried his method so I can't comment on how well it works or doesn't work. If you have tried it let me know.If you don't want to go the rice route, I found this really cool video on Howcast that tells you how to save your PDA phone without rice. All you need it a blow dryer, a Tupperware container, a towel and two silica gel packs. ...
More About: Phone , Saving

RAM Dumping to Hack Encrypted Hard Drives
2008-02-25 21:22:00
I read a blog post from Wired last Friday about a Princeton University experiment where they were able to hack into encrypted laptops by dumping the encryption key from RAM on the target computer. I was going to write about it today, and input my two cents, but my buddy Karl over at Ask The Admin beat me to it. So as not to do double work, I will re-post what he had to say on it, then proceed with my two cents. Before I do though, I wanted to point out that the Princeton experiment was conducted on machines protected by Bitlocker, FileVault, Truecrypt and DM-Crypt. Here is what Karl had to say:Have you seen this video yet? Even my mom has seen it but how many of you are actually using disk encryption? Really that many??What kind of illegal or illicit shit are you into?And you think your data warrants a torrent of hackers going after YOUR lappie?No we kid, we kid, of course AtA is all about privacy and protecting that (no matter if you are a shaddy admin or the pot dealer across the...
More About: Hack , Hard , Hard drives

Why is Windows Vista Slower Than Windows XP?
2008-02-24 05:07:00
Many people are taking the leap and upgrading their pc operating system from Windows XP to Windows Vista , only to be very disappointed by the distinct slow down in performance.Anecdotal evidence suggests that Windows Vista requires twice the computing power and resources to operate at a performance level similar to that of Windows XP. So what can you do to improve this?Firstly, it may be worth considering if you need to have all of the Vista bells and whistles that are turned on by default. The Aero interface in particular, although it looks pretty, requires considerable resources and it s worthwhile turning it off to see how much general performance improves. In addition many computers from manufacturers such as IBM come with a whole suite of ancillary support programs which you may not really need, such as firewall programs, anti virus programs, performance monitor programs, etcetera. Third party firewall programs in particular can use up a lot of resources. If you've been happy ...
More About: Windows Xp

Looking for an audio editor? Look no further!
2008-02-21 17:39:00
One thing I look for in a phone is the ability to play MP3's as ring tones. Wanna know why? Because I don't like paying my cell phone carrier for ringtones! That and I don't like the annoying stock tones that come with the phone! I like my phone to be an expression of me, not Verizon!My last phone could play MP3's, but not use them as ring tone. I wrote about how I got around that a while back. My new phone, the Blackberry Pearl isn't as tricky. It straight up plays MP3's as ring tones and doesn't give me any lip about it! The only problem, for me anyway, with using an MP3 as a ring tone is that I usually only let my phone ring for a second or two before I answer it. Since that is the case, I don't want the whole song, I only need a small part of the song. I also don't want to take up a lot of room on my phone either. To solve these problems one needs an audio editor that can trim the MP3 down a bit.I used to use Nero's Wave Editor which works great, but you have to buy it...
More About: Audio

Backup Retention Policies
2008-02-20 19:15:00
I am pretty much writing this to vent a little bit. Apparently my company is going through some litigation and since I am the backup admin I have been asked to recover a number of emails going back to 2003 for employees that no longer work for us.At my last company they had a pretty cool email retention policy. They didn't keep emails older than six months, and they did not allow PST archives. They put that out because of the Microsoft anti-trust suit a few years back where Microsoft was subpoenaed for their old emails, and had them used against them in the suit. Some damning emails from top level executives surfaced saying how they were going to crush the competition, and they were going to drive them out of business. You know stuff like that.By only retaining emails for 6 months, when you get subpoenaed, you can simply say that your policy is not to keep emails older than 6 months. It makes things easier from sysadmin standpoint, and it makes things easier for a legal standpoint....
More About: Backup , Policies , Retention

All Software is Free
2008-02-19 17:55:00
From time to time, I mention software that is commercial software that you have to pay for. Sure in most cases there is a free or open source solution that you can use instead of the pay-ware version, but that isn't always an option. If this is the case, what option do you have if you are a thrifty guy, or are on a limited budget?Arrgghhh me hearty! You hoist the Jolly Roger and go pirating matey!You can do a search on the internet for bit torrent sites on the internet like The Pirate Bay, or Torrent Spy, but I prefer a quicker method. There are two sites that I recommend for this purpose 9Down, and Nsane Down. Both sites have archives of both freeware and pirated software complete with cracks and patches.Be careful using such software though, because in many countries the use of such material is illegal and you can find yourself with two hots and a cot in the local slammer.Discalimer: I don't know the legal aspect of posting this. I am against software piracy and I hav...
More About: Software , Free

Hard To Wake Up? You Need A Water Gun Alarm Clock
2008-02-15 21:23:00
I am a very deep sleeper. I find it extremely hard to wake up in the mornings. I have a special morning ritual that I have been doing for some time that helps me out. I will set my alarm to go off about an hour before I really have to get up. When it goes off I go out to the living room and set an alarm on the microwave to go off every 15 minutes, then I go and sleep on the recliner. The idea is that since I am getting woken up every 15 minutes, and can't ever get too comfortable and I will eventually wake up in time. Most of the time it works.That may sound a bit drastic. You might ask me, "Why don't you just set your clock ahead?" Well, I tried that, and I end up waking up, doing the math in my head to figure out what time it really is, then I go back to sleep thinking I have ten more minutes. Nope, it just doesn't work for me.This solution from Howcast may be the thing I am looking for. It is a modded alarm clock that sprays water in your face when the alarm goes off. Check it...
More About: Clock , Water , Hard , Wake , Alarm

Got Myself a Blackberry Pearl
2008-02-14 17:01:00
I just got a promotion at the beginning of the year at my day job. One of the perks as some may call it, or a huge burden as others would, is that I get a company Blackberry phone. Well I just got it yesterday. Actually, that is not true, I got it the day before yesterday, but I couldn't play with it because I was in training all day. That is neither here nor there.Anyway, yesterday was the first day I really got to play with it, and so far I think it is probably the best PDA phone I have ever had. I have had a Palm Treo 650, a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard), and a Nokia 9300. All of my previous phones had their ups and downs. The one I disliked the most was the Palm. What a piece of junk phone that was! I finally gave that one up after too many times of it freezing up when I had an incoming call so I couldn't answer it. The Cingular 8125 was okay, but like the Treo it is too bulky, and I always felt like a nerd carrying a big piece of hardware like that around. The Nokia 9300 worked ...
More About: Pearl

Windows Defender Won't Update. Now What?
2008-02-11 19:55:00
For a long time we were using Spybot Search & Destroy at my company to do simple spyware cleanups. I love Spybot, and have been using it for quite a long time. We stopped using it because we read the fine print of their license agreement which says that if you want to use Spybot in a commercial organization, you have to buy their corporate version. We are too cheap to do that, so we removed it from all of our workstations.We opted for Windows Defender , which in my opinion isn't the greatest anti-spyware program in the world, but it does beat a sharp stick in the eye. The biggest problem with Windows Defender in my opinion is that updating it is a crap shoot. So many times have I installed it, then tried to update it only for it to tell me that no update is available. Are you trying to tell me that there have been no updates since 2006? Bull Shit!I decided to find out if there was a way to manually update the definition files of Windows Defender, and I have good news. There is a...
More About: Update

Open Source Alternative to Quicken or Money
2008-02-10 21:00:00
Tax season is upon us again, and I don’t know about you, but that kind of gets me thinking about my finances a bit. If you are like me, perhaps you are looking to find a better way to manage your finances, accounts and other items a little better. Maybe you just want to see where all of your dollars are going, or maybe you’re a small business owner looking to keep track of the books. Whatever your reason, you may be in the market for some kind of accounting software. If you are like my wife, you probably thought about going out and getting something from the big dogs like Intuit’s Quicken, or Microsoft Money . Not this guy, I’m not going down the pay-ware super highway unless I am forced to at gun point. I found an open source accounting program that has ports for Windows, and Linux, and of course, it is free. Money Manager Ex is the name of the software. It has a real basic interface, so you won’t get lost in all of the bells and whistles that you might find in their...
More About: Open Source , Alternative , Open , Source

Read and Write Access to Linux File Systems From Windows
2008-02-09 17:25:00
I love Linux ! My distro of choice is Ubuntu. I have been using Ubuntu pretty actively for the last three years. However, no matter how hard I try I can't remove Windows from my life. That is because my wife is an avid Windows user. I have tried and tried to convert her, but the fact is she is too lazy to learn a new operating system.So picture this scenario; You have a couple of windows machines and one of them starts blue screening like crazy. You decide after hours of troubleshooting to re-image. You want to back up the files so you decide to take the hard drive out, put it in another Windows box using your IDE to USB adapter. No big deal right? You now have access to all of your files on your other Windows box.What if you're like me, and one of your computer's is running on Ubuntu? If your Windows box crashes, you can connect the drive, and mount it in Linux because most Linux distros now days have NTFS-3G installed which is a driver to read and write to NTFS from Linux.Now w...
More About: Write , File , Read

Definition of Irony: Anti virus Company Gets Hacked
2008-02-08 23:02:00
I couldn't believe it when I read it! According to a recent post on IT Business Edge's Headline Watch, an Indian anti virus company called AVsoft Technologies, makers of SmartCop, had one of their download servers hacked and made to distribute a variant of the Virut virus.Doing a search for SmartCop on Google turns up the company's website, S-Cop.com, but if you click on the link you get this lovely block page from Google to protect your curious ass from malicious code on the company's servers:Infoworld also reported on this unusually funny event. This is taken from InfoWorld:The download section of AvSoft's S-cop Web site hosts the malicious code, according to Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor AVG. "They let one of their pages get hit by an iFrame injection," he said. "It shows that anyone can be a victim.... It's hard to protect Web servers properly." The technique used on the site has been seen in thousands of similar hacks over ...
More About: Anti Virus , Virus , Company , Anti-Virus , Irony

New Version of TrueCrypt Out! Now With Full Hard Drive Encryption!
2008-02-07 17:05:00
You all know of my love for TrueCrypt right? I mean, this is the software that caused some controversy a couple of months back between me and the nice people over at IronKey. Not to worry, I finally conceded in that debacle, but that doesn't change my opinion that TrueCrypt is one of the most awesome free encryption programs ever made.I first discovered TrueCrypt back at my last company when I learned that the Network Security Manager was beta testing full hard drive encryption for company laptops. The program he was using costs upwards of $250 per license. I knew I could probably find something just as good for free. That is when I found TrueCrypt. Of course, at that time it didn't do full hard drive encryption (operating system and all), but it was still pretty cool. I liked the idea that I could put all of my porn...errr...important files on a fully encrypted USB stick, and not worry about it getting into the wrong hands.That has all changed in the new version (Now version 5.0)...
More About: Encryption , Drive , Hard , Full , Hard Drive

I don't know why I didn't think of it before! Picasa for Image Hosting
2008-02-05 23:52:00
A few months ago I ranted about free file hosting on FileDen and I said that I was switching over to Photobucket because they offered more free bandwidth for hot linking pictures. Well, about a week or two ago I had the same problem with photobucket. Apparently 25GB gets used up quickly when you get between 700 to 1000 visitors a day like Bauer-Power.Well my wife spends about three hours a night fiddling with Picasa , Google's free photo editor and organizer. When she is done playing with them she uploads them to her Picasa album online. Well today I decided to check it out. I mean, I have a Google account, I might as well log into Picasa and take a look see.Low and behold I found that I already have albums because of all the images I upload to blogger. All of those images are also hosted on Picasa. Whats more is that any image I upload, they give you a link to hot link it on other sites! Even better is that since they are owned by Google, there are now bandwidth restrictions!Anothe...
More About: Hosting , Image , Image Hosting

Bauer-Power 1000ec Entrecard Extravaganza!
2008-02-04 22:03:00
I have been a member of Entrecard for a while, and so far it has been pretty good to me. It brings in a steady amount of daily traffic which is a lot more than I can say for BlogRush when I tried it.Anyway, I see tons of these Entrecard contest going around and I figured, what they hell! Why not get in on the action, and have a little fun with it too! For those of you not in the know, whenever you drop your card on someone's site you get some Entrecard credits (ec), you also get credits if someone buys advertising on your widget. These methods are all good, but the fastest and easiest way to earn credits is by winning these Entrecard contests!So here is how I will run my contest:The contest will run until the end of the month. Whoever has the most entries by that time will win. Here is how you enter:Leave a comment: worth 1 entryAdvertise on my widget: worth 2 entriesBlog about my contest with a link back: worth 5 entriesSubscribe to my RSS feed: 10 entries[EDIT: I removed the part...
More About: Power , Bauer

BES 4.1 Upgrade Verdict: SUCCESS!
2008-02-04 19:40:00
As I mentioned in some previous posts, my company was planning on upgrading our Blackberry Enterprise server from version 4.0.6 to version 4.1.4. I spent the better part of last month planning things out so that when it came down to the upgrade there would be minimal service interruptions.Well, I stayed late at work Friday night to do the upgrade, and I am happy to report it was a huge success! There was one minor issue when upgrading the database. The issue was caused by a corrupt backup file of the database. when you do the upgrade, one of the steps is to upgrade the database to the new schema. During that process there is a check box asking you if you want to make a backup copy of the database before upgrading. Logically I left that checked, however that was the cause of my problem. I found that out because I checked the SQL logs in C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQLLOG. The log said the following:The backup data in 'C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQLDataBES...
More About: Success , Verdict