Outlook 2013 Contact Pictures Gone

I had upgraded my Outlook from 2010 to 2013 on my laptop.  After doing so I no longer got the nice contact photos in each email.  This was useful to me since it helped me put peoples names to their face.  A friend showed me how to remedy it at work.

1. In Outlook go to Send/Receive tab (next to Home at top)
2. Click on the Send/Receive Groups drop-down in the top banner
3. In the drop down select Download address book

After doing this I had the pictures of the people.  Note that I believe I will have to do this every-once in awhile as people are added to the global address book for my company.

Alternate:
Download from the File Tab is also an option.

Heartbleed iRule

This iRule found on devcentral.f5.com looks at all server responses and blocks any that are longer than 128 bytes.  The only downside I see to this is the overhead at looking at all the packets.

https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/ssl-heartbleed-server-side-irule#.U0vQBE0U-Hs​

What schedule do you follow?

I was reading another article about time management (most are the same these days) and came across an old link to an essay by Paul Graham.  I found it a good read and worth 5 minutes of my time.

The Short

There are two types of schedules in our world.  The managers and the makers.  The managers make the big decisions and direct work at a high level.  To accomplish this their time is chunked into 1 hour meeting blocks all day.  The makers are the ones producing products to sell.  They need large blocks from 1/2 of a day to 1 day to focus on their work.

Take Away

 If your an engineer try to shift meetings to the beginning of the day or the end.  Better yet make sure you are attending the right meetings and not just any meeting your invited to.  This will give you more time to focus and complete work.

SharePoint 2013 SP1 Generate New Key Issue

I am in the process of setting up TFS 2013 with SharePoint 2013 SP1 and ran into a generic error that took me a good deal of trial and error to figure out.  Luckily someone else in this world ran into the same issue and posted the solution on MSDN.

My application and SQL server are both Windows 2012 SR2.  SQL 2012 version 11.0.3128.  To get SharePoint and it's prerequisites to install properly with little intervention I had to use SharePoint 2013 SP1.  I don't think SP1 made any difference as the solution was for 2013.

One of the steps in configuring SharePoint 2013 SP1 for use with TFS is to Generate a New Key in the Secure Store Service Application.

After entering my passphrase and selecting OK the message An error occurred during the "Generate Key" process.  Please try again or contact your administrator appeared.



The event log may have an entry generated by your domain account that looks like the below message.

The next step was to start searching for solutions and came across one good page that didn't work for me but might for someone else.  I tried everything in this article with no luck.  I did come across the one that worked for me as well but executed it wrong the first time.

Basically there is a service that is not running in SharePoint called the Claims to Windows Token Service.  You are to start it and restart 3 SharePoint services.  Then reset IIS.

1. SharePoint Administration
2. SharePoint Timer Service
3. SharePoint Tracing Service
4. Start -> Run -> iisreset

My problem was I started the service the old fashioned way.  This did not work for me.

To get it working you have to go to the System Settings -> Manage Services on Server page in the SharePoint Central Administration site.  From there start it and then restart the other services.  Once done give creating the key a shot.  It worked for me!

Microsoft OneNote Journal not syncing

Sync Issue with OneNote

For a week or 2 now my Work notebook has not been syncing to my SkyDrive.  I have been fixing any page sync errors between all of my devices one at a time.  This has yeilded no success yet.  Then I came across this article from Microsoft for the error being reported.

The error message is:
We're sorry, something went wrong during sync. We'll try again later. (Error code: 0xE000005E)

Clicking on Get Help sent me here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/resolve-the-0xe000005e-referencedrevisionnotfound-error-in-onenote-HA104010799.aspx

One thing to note is don't forget to permanently delete the notebook out of the OneNote Recycle Bin.  If you don't the sync will still fail.

After that is done if you want the notebook to have the same name as the original just rename it.

Team Unity

There was an issue at work one day were people were ratting on each other and snapping at one another.  I pulled out some things I learned over the years to share with that team.  I hope they felt empowered and accountable for building the team.

• Solve issues within the team.  Involve management as little as possible.
• Talk to someone if something is bothering you.  Don't internalize it and start snapping at your coworkers.  Once the damage is done it is hard to repair.  This takes courage but you will feel better for having done it.
• If you have made mistakes apologize for them.  It helps to heal the damage you have done.
• Rats are vermin that spread disease.  Don't be a rat or you will most likely find yourself avoided by your team.
• Reputations proceed people.  Make sure yours is a good one.
• Present as a unified team.  Come up with recommendations as a team and present them.  If everyone goes and give there opinions on how something should be done it makes it harder for the decision maker to make a good decision.  There are always many ways to do the same thing in the IT world and the fewer the choices the easier it is to decide and get working.
• United we stand divided we fall in the corporate world means everyone must act professional.  Teams that get along are more productive and makes the grind more enjoyable.  When there is a negative atmosphere people tend to leave the company and then the few are left with much responsibility. 

DNSCMD Examples

Any of these commands can be combined and put in batch file or run separately.  Take note that they need to be run in a certain order if setting up from scratch.  The order would be zones and then records in the zone.  Note the parameter flags are case sensitive (ZoneAdd not zoneadd).

Records can be deleted instead of added by replacing Add with Delete, example /ZoneDelete

Add a zone:

dnscmd /ZoneAdd rasky.com /DSPrimary /DP /forest

Add an A record:

dnscmd /RecordAdd rasky.com test A 10.200.122.139
dnscmd /RecordAdd rasky.com @ A 10.200.122.140 (parent record)

Add a CNAME (alias):

dnscmd /RecordAdd rasky.com aliasname CNAME realname.rasky.com