Technology Insights

Where Is The Voting Button In Email Composed In Outlook

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Earlier today I was sent an email by a client asking me to click a vote button if I approved of the technical documentation they had composed. After reading the documentation I went to click what I assumed would be some form of approved button however I couldn’t find it. After looking over every inch of the email window I decided to go ahead and compose my own test to see if I could first add voting buttons to an email composed in Outlook and second if I could use those actual voting buttons once I received the email to another email account. Below I show the location of the voting buttons in Outlook as well as how to compose an email to others and add a voting button.

Technology Insights

Where Is The Wireless Switch On A HP Pavillion 6555b Laptop, HP Wireless Assistant: WLAN Disabled

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Earlier while working on a laptop that I rarely use because it is only required to access one of my clients networks the Wireless network interface stopped working. Initially I thought the Windows XP computer was in the process of crashing however I soon figured out that this was not the case. I started looking for the Wireless switch, which is typically used on modern laptops to turn the Wireless interface off and on, but I was unable to locate it initially. Below I describe how I eventually noticed that the Wireless switch had been disabled, where the WiFi switch is located, and how to turn the Wireless switch on a HP Pavillion 6555b back to the on position.

Technology Errors

Retrospect Backup Software For Windows: Error 505 Backup Client Reserved

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As noted in a previous article I was tasked by a client with figuring out why their Retrospect Backup software for Windows was not working properly. Since I was not familiar with Retrospect I had to troubleshoot from the beginning. I started troubleshooting on the Windows 2003 R2 server running Retrospect and was able to easily see the log files showing the errors backing up one of the companies Exchange servers. When I attempted to manually backup a single mailbox on the Microsoft Exchange server I was receiving the same errors. Below I describe the Retrospect backup error and then explain step by step how I was able to resolve the error.

Technology Insights

How To See How Long A Windows Server Has Been Up, Windows 2003 R2 Uptime Reading

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Earlier while troubleshooting an issue for a customer I needed to start at the bare minimum of troubleshooting because the issue at hand was a bit out of my area of expertise. The problem as reported existed on a Windows 2003 R2 server running backup software called Retrospect. The backup software was reporting via email to the IT staff that it was no longer working and they needed me to locate the issue and resolve. The first thing I needed to do was to see how long the server had been up, if any patches had been applied recently, and if anything else had changed since the last successful backup. Again since this is out of my area of expertise I first needed to see how long the server had been up which luckily is almost as easy to do on Windows 2003 R2 as it is on Linux. Below I provide to examples of how to check server uptime on Windows.

Technology Insights

Change vi Defaults To Not Display Line Numbers When Editing Files On Linux

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Recently I was contracted to do some work for a new client that had around 25 CentOS Linux and Ubuntu Linux servers. The client needed various system administration tasks completed such as updating the servers, modifying a couple scripts that performed automated tasks, and a couple other basic tasks. I typically use vi to modify scripts or text files on Linux servers so when I started to perform my tasks I started getting annoyed as the vi default configuration included the line numbers which makes it a pain to copy/paste from the files you are editing. You can obviously turn off the line number display by typing “:” followed by “set nonu” (both without the quotes) however that does get old. Use the information below to change the default vi configuration so line numbers no longer display by default.