Christos Polydorou

I had a very strange error last Saturday where the full backup of an exchange server failed with the code "Error querying the writer status". I knew there had to be something with the Volume Shadow Copy Service so I tried to restart it and then run the backup job but it failed again. After a short search on the Symantec forums, I found a solution... First of all I stopped the agent service on the target computer. Then I renamed the file "C:\program files\Symantec\backup exec\raws\bedsshadow.dll" to something else and started the agent service. The job failed again but this time due to a communications failure. I then stopped the agent service, gave the file it's original name and started the agent service again. This time the job completed successfully!

A user complained about the SaveAsPDFandXPS addin functionality today, because there was a problem with transparent images. The transparent part of the images was converted to black instead. After a google search I discovered that if one enables the option to create a PDF/A file, the above problem appears because transparent images are not supported in that format. After disabling the option for PDF/A everything worked great.

Microsoft IIS allows you to publish multiple sites on the same port (usually 80) using host headers. You can have many different Windows SharePoint Apolications that listen on the same port by just changing the host header. Usually after creating a website with a host header I create a DNS alias with the host header that points to the server that hosts the site. With ISA 2006 you can publish the web application but if you try to publish it using https and the web server uses http you may run into some problems with the Alternate Access Mappings. After you create the Web Listener on the ISA server and publish the web application you have to make sure that the publishing rule forwards the original host header and listens for the specific site. You must also configure the bindings on the IIS and the AAM on the SharePoint site. Go to AAM menu and configure the public URLs for each zone of each site. Most times I set up Default and Internet. Add the correct address for each zone ...

I run across the following problem today: I have a sharepoint site that is working fine and I had to add five new users that do not have an Exchange mailbox. I created the users on Active Directory, configured their email address on AD with the address they have on their organization but the users did not get the emails sent from the site. Since the users that have an exchange mailbox receive this kind of mails without any problems I decided to create five contacts, one for each new user, on the Exchange server and add their external email address as the primary SMTP and External address. After that I changed the email address on Active Directory to the email address that the exchange added according to the email address policy it has (any internal email address may be fine too). Now when Sharepoint sends a message to the user, the message is handled by Exchange and is delivered to the external address of the user.

I've been developing a new drupal site recently and I came across the following problem: The font of the logo of the site is not a web font and I didn't want to change the CSS and have the users' browsers download the font, so I created an image with the font (I know this is not what I should have done because of SEO). When I uploaded the image to the site I noticed that the background color of the header (where the image is) is set to be fading... I had set the background color on the image but there was a problem because of the effect. I thought that I may solve the problem by turning the background of the image to transparent and so I did. When I uploaded the new image on the site the result was not what I was hopping for... The transparent part of the image was converted to white. After searching the web for a while I discovered that you have to save the image file as PNG or GIF in order to use the transparency of the image file. So I fired up Photoshop aga...

When using Microsoft Outlook with an IMAP account, because the account does not support contacts, tasks and notes those items are not stored in the PST file that belongs to the account but in an other PST file. So if you want to recover those items, after a system failure for example, you have to search your profile for any PST file and then open the right file, the one that contains your contacts and notes. Notice that you may have to select the folders view in order to see the contacts and notes folder.

There are many times that you need to be sure that a file you downloaded from the internet or copied from a location is the same as the original. There are many tools that can help you with that but my favorite is md5sum (and md5deep when it comes to comparing directories). The usage is very simple. The command md5sum FILE will show you the hash for the file and the file name. So the only thing you have to do is get the sum of the original file, the sum of your file and compare them. If they are the same, your file is not corrupted or tampered with. Comparing the hashes your self may not be very easy but there is a way to do it using a hash file. Simply save the result of the above command to a file, like md5sum FILE > hashfile.md5 and then use the option -c to compare the hash of your file to the hash in the hashfile. I always use relative paths because that way you can export the hash of the file to a hash file that is on the same directory with the original file for exam...