Category Archives: Windows sysadmin

Reverting Malwarebytes from Free Trial Expired to Free Malwarebytes howto

malware-bytes-revert-to-free-end-free-trial-recover-from-expired-trial-purchase-to-free-to-protect-your-pc-from-spyware

Note: When the evaluation period was over, you’ll get a popup or notification, conveying message ‘Trial expired, You are no longer protected because Malwarebytes Anti-Malware free Trial has expired’, you’ll be presented with options to ‘End Trial’ and ‘Buy Premium’.
That’s pretty annoying especially as Malware Bytes is a real anti-spyware diamond software that worths to be ran every now and then to keep your PC protected from ever increasing terrible spyware malware and ransomeware.

Thanksfully it is rather easy to fix that and revert back to Malwarebytes Free Trial.

Open Malwarebytes, and on the Dashboard, click on ‘Malwarebytess or End Free Trial’, the message here does vary according to the version you have. Then will be instantly converted to the free version.

Outlook block pictures howto / Change images in E-mail messages to not show automatically

dont-download-automatically-images-pictures-in-email-correspondence-in-ms-outlook-on-windows-7-8-10

If you’re working in a corporation such as IBM or Hewlett Packard Enterprise and you’re forced to use MS Outlook Express, because of the Calendar / Lync integration, you probably will get a lot of useless Corporate Junk informative emails (Corporate SPAM). This is very annoying but the ugly thing is, you have to check that emails and you can’t simply send them in Spam folder, at least partially. The major irritation from these SPAM like corporate emails steams in the annoying pictures, which are supposed to give you e-mail interactivity sense but instead or showing a lot of laughing joyful (bur obviously brainless) looking people.
These is too much annoying at a point, so in order to decrease the mind overheat from that, I’ve decided that it will be nice to not show up the pictures in Outlook emails.

Initially I thought there might be necessery to install an extra plugin, but after a quick search in Google Search Engine, luckily it turned out Outlook is equipped with such functionality by default:

Block picture downloads for all messages in Outlook Express

  1. Click the File tab.
  2. Click Options.
  3. Click Trust Center.
  4. Under Microsoft Outlook Trust Center, click Trust Center Settings.
  5. Clear the Don’t download pictures automatically in HTML e-mail messages or RSS items check box.

How to Enable All Macros In Microsoft Excel 2010 – Enable / Disable Macros by default for Macros Office files

Macros are disabled by default in Office 2010(Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010, etc) for enhanced security. However it might happen that you need to enable macros because some installed Application needs to use the Macros without confirmation (this is especially for applications running inside well firewalled DMZ-ed networks).

Enabling Macros is easy but Microsoft Office team has hidden it deeper inside Options. Here is how to Enable All macros in Excel 2010

Excel-TrustCenter-Settings-Enable-All-Macros-Office-2010

First click the File Menu(Office Backstage) and select Options from the left sidebar. In options, select Trust Center from the left sidebar and click Trust Center Settings button on the main window.

Office-2010-TrustCenter-Macros-Settings-Enable-All-Macros-in-Excel-and-Windows-Office-2010

Now in Trust Center Settings dialog window, select Macro Settings from the left sidebar, choose Enable All Macros option and hit OK.

Its that simple. From now onwards Excel 2010 won’t bother you anymore about Macro security. It is recommended that you use this option only when you are installing trusted add-ins and opening trusted documents. If an unknown dangerous macro code runs, then it could corrupt your Office 2010 installation or give you other sorts of problems.

You can use the above procedure to enable macros in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Outlook 2010, etc

Google chrome install crx howto – Installing chrome plugin (exntensions) manually

https://pc-freak.net/images/google-chrome-install-crx-format-plugins-manually-howto
I’ve recently had to install Google Chrome on old already unsupported Ubuntu 10.10 Linux release, after a long search I come across an old deb packages of Chrome that works on Ubuntu 10.10.
So far so good now Ubuntu had Chrome, but there was not the basic (must have) extension support of Adblock Plus (disabling website advertisements) which I usually install on any Fresh (new) installed Linux / Windows desktop customer.

This is done pretty simple you have to Open Chrome Browser extension Interface:

(Go to Right corner 3 Dashes) Tools menu -> Settings -> Extensions

Or if you prefer to do it manually with a command like me type in URL address bar:

chrome://chrome/extensions/

Usually plugin files for Chrome that are installable comes in Custom-Plugin-namer.JS or Whatever-plugin-name.CRX.

Next take the plugin (from any folder it is located or right from Chrome’s download folder or wherever the plugin you want to install that is not otherwise available via Chrome Web Store and
(drag and drop) – place it into Extensions opened window.

You’ll be prompted to confirm installation of the extension, just as if you had installed it from the Chrome Web Store.

Adblock-Plus-for-Google-Chrome-install-plugin-yes-or-no-prompt-screenshot-linux-windows-macos

This will make the plugin install or ask you few questions to approve the installation. The custom Adblock (old version) which I used to install successfully is located here. I’ve tried installing also some other Adblock+ versions from ABS developers site but the versions provided there was too new and failed to install.

If you don’t want to be in future bothered with annoying “Do you want to install plugin?” prompt you can configure Chrome to start each time with an option:

–enable-easy-off-store-extension-install

configure-chrome-to-always-install-plugins-without-confirmation-prompt-chrome-properties-windows-os-screenshot

Sysadmins Don’t buy 3TB Seagate Hard Disks! – 3TB hard disk huge disk failure reports

Dont-buy-Seagate-3-TB-HDDs-or-you-will-have-big-problems-with-server-data-and-downtimes
Seagate Hard disks of 3 Terabyte volume used to be very attractive HDDs (storage) option when they were launched on the market.
Many people and sysadmins have already bought such ones and some sysadmins and company customers that already choose Seagate are badly suffering because of that and thus it is good to warn others to stay away from 3TB SeaGate Hard Disks.

Backblaze (Online Backup) company is one of the most severely affected companies that made the choise to use Seagate as a storage devices on their Cloud inter-connected servers. They used 41 213 hard disks in their computing Data Center as of 31 December 2014.

In their disk arrays they have used Western Digital (now part of Western DIgital) and of course pitily Seagate.

The problematic hard disks that they faced issues with are Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3TB sized is the hard disks with most failures within Backblaze for whole 2014 about 40% percents!! of all 3TB hard disks the company had break up, died or had to be replaced because of I/O disk failures and bad-sectors.

It is not exactly clear what is the reason for such a high failures but Seagate were leaders in failures followed by Western Digital and HGTX (the ex-Hitachi).

 


Just for a comparison Backblaze reports that 4 Tetabyte hard disks which they bought last year had failures, very rarely and in general the company is quite happy with Seagate / WD disks of 4 TB volume.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3TB disk drives mounted on their servers are the one who had most hardware issues and the company recommends anyone willing to buy a new HDD to stay away from this volume.

Western Digitals 3TB HDDs had 10% of failure rate, HGTS had only 2.6% and Seagate exact failed HDDs were approximately 43.1% with a HDD failure!!

No severe hardware HDD failures are reported with 4 TB hdds.
4TB Seagate HDDs gave 5% of defects, followed by WD with 3-4% and HGTS with only 1.4%.

Statistics clearly shows it if you want to buy a big storage for your big data / Web / FTP / Dropbox (Cloud) hosting Company as of time of writting 26.01.2015 it is better equip your Big Storage Array racks with HGTS branded hard drives.

 

How to See Load Avarage on Windows server with command line

I need to prepare a document called Operational Readiness Test (ORT) for a Windows server which will be going to production soon in that regards its necessery to fill-in the ORT document form the server load avarage. Here is how to get a Windows load avarage from command line:

C:\> wmic cpu get loadpercentage
LoadPercentage
1

alternative way to get Windows system load avarage data is with a short BAT for loop

C:\> @for /f “skip=1” %p in (‘wmic cpu get loadpercentage’) do @echo %p%
%p%
1%
%

That’s all now we have Windows Load Avarage. Note that this command should work on Windows 7 / 8 / Windows server 2012. Haven’t tested that on Windows XP and NT 4.0 but I guess it should be working too.

wmic command is very interesting one I advise you check out its complete help:
C:\> wmic /?
[global switches]

The following global switches are available:
/NAMESPACE Path for the namespace the alias operate against.
/ROLE Path for the role containing the alias definitions.
/NODE Servers the alias will operate against.
/IMPLEVEL Client impersonation level.
/AUTHLEVEL Client authentication level.
/LOCALE Language id the client should use.
/PRIVILEGES Enable or disable all privileges.
/TRACE Outputs debugging information to stderr.
/RECORD Logs all input commands and output.
/INTERACTIVE Sets or resets the interactive mode.
/FAILFAST Sets or resets the FailFast mode.
/USER User to be used during the session.
/PASSWORD Password to be used for session login.
/OUTPUT Specifies the mode for output redirection.
/APPEND Specifies the mode for output redirection.
/AGGREGATE Sets or resets aggregate mode.
/AUTHORITY Specifies the for the connection.
/?[:<BRIEF|FULL>] Usage information.

For more information on a specific global switch, type: switch-name /?

The following alias/es are available in the current role:
ALIAS – Access to the aliases available on the local system
BASEBOARD – Base board (also known as a motherboard or system boa
rd) management.
BIOS – Basic input/output services (BIOS) management.
BOOTCONFIG – Boot configuration management.
CDROM – CD-ROM management.
COMPUTERSYSTEM – Computer system management.
CPU – CPU management.
CSPRODUCT – Computer system product information from SMBIOS.
DATAFILE – DataFile Management.
DCOMAPP – DCOM Application management.
DESKTOP – User’s Desktop management.
DESKTOPMONITOR – Desktop Monitor management.
DEVICEMEMORYADDRESS – Device memory addresses management.
DISKDRIVE – Physical disk drive management.
DISKQUOTA – Disk space usage for NTFS volumes.
DMACHANNEL – Direct memory access (DMA) channel management.
ENVIRONMENT – System environment settings management.
FSDIR – Filesystem directory entry management.
GROUP – Group account management.
IDECONTROLLER – IDE Controller management.
IRQ – Interrupt request line (IRQ) management.
JOB – Provides access to the jobs scheduled using the sche
dule service.
LOADORDER – Management of system services that define execution d
ependencies.
LOGICALDISK – Local storage device management.
LOGON – LOGON Sessions.
MEMCACHE – Cache memory management.
MEMORYCHIP – Memory chip information.
MEMPHYSICAL – Computer system’s physical memory management.
NETCLIENT – Network Client management.
NETLOGIN – Network login information (of a particular user) mana
gement.
NETPROTOCOL – Protocols (and their network characteristics) managem
ent.
NETUSE – Active network connection management.
NIC – Network Interface Controller (NIC) management.
NICCONFIG – Network adapter management.
NICCONFIG – Network adapter management.
NTDOMAIN – NT Domain management.
NTEVENT – Entries in the NT Event Log.
NTEVENTLOG – NT eventlog file management.
ONBOARDDEVICE – Management of common adapter devices built into the
otherboard (system board).
OS – Installed Operating System/s management.
PAGEFILE – Virtual memory file swapping management.
PAGEFILESET – Page file settings management.
PARTITION – Management of partitioned areas of a physical disk.
PORT – I/O port management.
PORTCONNECTOR – Physical connection ports management.
PRINTER – Printer device management.
PRINTERCONFIG – Printer device configuration management.
PRINTJOB – Print job management.
PROCESS – Process management.
PRODUCT – Installation package task management.
QFE – Quick Fix Engineering.
QUOTASETTING – Setting information for disk quotas on a volume.
RDACCOUNT – Remote Desktop connection permission management.
RDNIC – Remote Desktop connection management on a specific n
twork adapter.
RDPERMISSIONS – Permissions to a specific Remote Desktop connection.
RDTOGGLE – Turning Remote Desktop listener on or off remotely.
RECOVEROS – Information that will be gathered from memory when t
e operating system fails.
REGISTRY – Computer system registry management.
SCSICONTROLLER – SCSI Controller management.
SERVER – Server information management.
SERVICE – Service application management.
SHADOWCOPY – Shadow copy management.
SHADOWSTORAGE – Shadow copy storage area management.
SHARE – Shared resource management.
SOFTWAREELEMENT – Management of the elements of a software product in
talled on a system.
SOFTWAREFEATURE – Management of software product subsets of SoftwareEl
ment.
SOUNDDEV – Sound Device management.
STARTUP – Management of commands that run automatically when u
ers log onto the computer system.
SYSACCOUNT – System account management.
SYSDRIVER – Management of the system driver for a base service.
SYSTEMENCLOSURE – Physical system enclosure management.
SYSTEMSLOT – Management of physical connection points including p
rts, slots and peripherals, and proprietary connections points.
TAPEDRIVE – Tape drive management.
TEMPERATURE – Data management of a temperature sensor (electronic
hermometer).
TIMEZONE – Time zone data management.
UPS – Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) management.
USERACCOUNT – User account management.
VOLTAGE – Voltage sensor (electronic voltmeter) data managemen
.
VOLUME – Local storage volume management.
VOLUMEQUOTASETTING – Associates the disk quota setting with a specific di
k volume.
VOLUMEUSERQUOTA – Per user storage volume quota management.
WMISET – WMI service operational parameters management.

For more information on a specific alias, type: alias /?

CLASS – Escapes to full WMI schema.
PATH – Escapes to full WMI object paths.
CONTEXT – Displays the state of all the global switches.
QUIT/EXIT – Exits the program.

For more information on CLASS/PATH/CONTEXT, type: (CLASS | PATH | CONTEXT) /?