Netexceed blog by Jason Mohan» Netexceed by Jason Mohan

How to backup WSS 3.0 automatically

Jason Mohan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:52:41 +0000

So how do you backup WSS 3.0 automatically? Well you know you can go into the operations center and backup manually, by setting the destination. However this will not automatically backup your sharepoint farm on a daily basis. There is a simple command to backup your sharepoint farm via command line. Once you have a command line then you can create a batch file and backup however your want.

Here’s the backup command: stsadm -o backup -directory c:\backup -backupmethod full

Here’s my batch file, I’m backing up to the local hard drive and then copying it to a share (my share is not a Windows computer, so I can’t backup directly to it, but if you want to backup to a share you can as long as it’s on the domain).

cd “c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin”
stsadm -o backup -directory c:\backup -backupmethod full
net use s: \\192.168.0.21\backups
xcopy c:\backup s:\wss /e /h /y
net use s: /delete

How to start a full crawl on sharepoint

Jason Mohan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:20:23 +0000

If you trying to get sharepoint to start a full crawl of your site, or you need to diagnose a problem you have to wait for sharepoint to start it’s full crawl interval. However with the below command you have it start immediately.

Stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart

How to access embedded SQL on WSS 3.0

Jason Mohan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:54:32 +0000

I wanted to access the SQL databases on my WSS 3.0 server, however I was using the embedded edition of SQL. So I downloaded SQL Management Server studio, but I couldn’t still access the databases. It kept saying it can’t make a remote connection to the server though I was trying to access it via local to the machine. Then I found this. Type it in as the server name, and violia!

Server Name: \\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\SQL\QUERY

iPhone Jailbreak for 3.1.3 is here!

Jason Mohan — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:16:32 +0000

The iPhone spirit Jailbreak for 3.1.3 is here. Much thanks goes to the Dev Team and @comex for this release. Works on iPhone 3G, 3GS, and the iPad. Jailbreak is very easy, attach your iphone or ipad and click jailbreak that’s it. Below are the screenshots for the mac version of spirit. The download links for Windows and Mac are below.

1. Download link for iPhone Spirit Jailbreak.

Screenshots for Spirit on a mac.

Reboot your server remotely with IPMI using Dell’s BMC

Jason Mohan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:51:13 +0000

I bought a new poweredge T110 server, it came with BMC (Baseboard management controller) already installed. I needed to reboot the system, because it was unresponsive (Windows 2008 server crashed). However I can’t RDP into it, and I’m not at the site where the physical machine is located. All I needed was someone to power cycle it, but no one was available. That’s when I did some research. Apparently all new poweredge servers come with at least BMC installed. I couldn’t purchased an iDrac for that server because it wasn’t available. So after some research I found the Dell BMC supports IPMI. However you need something to access the BMC using IPMI, and I don’t have linux so I can’t use the impitool. That’s when I found this software, IPMIView from Supermicro. Now you have to first configure the BMC, physically on the box before you can do all this (usually when the server boots up you’ll see this message press ctrl – e to configure BMC within 5 seconds). Luckily I configured this when I installed the server initially.

1. Install the software.

2. Go to File > New System

3. Put in the IP Address for the BMC controller, this should be different that your ip address for the server.

4. Double click on your the newly created system, and put in your username and password (again you should’ve configured this initially on the BMC controller when you installed the server).

5. Now go to IPM Device, and pick reset.

6. Now you server should reboot, like if you were on site pressing the power button.

Turning webpages into applications on a mac

Jason Mohan — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:30:07 +0000

There are some web applications out there, that you wish were actually applications instead of firing up a web browser and navigating to the web application. Well you can if you have a mac, with a program called Fluid. It’s simple and easy. I recently converted a weather web app into a full blown application. If you live in Houston, you know the weather changes drastically from one day to the next. Like yesterday, it was warm in the 70’s and then last night it was in the 30’s. However I wanted a weather app that was easy and simple to use. So I created one with Fluid and Weather Underground and put the instructions below. This will work for any webpage, if you can navigate to it, it will work. Now I’m not sure if there is an application like this for windows, but if you know of any please let us know via comments. EDIT: Check out Prism for Windows which does pretty much the same thing.

1. First download Fluid and install it on your mac.

2. Now navigate to the webpage you want to turn into a app. I used this site from weather underground. http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/.

3. Now I navigated to Houston, because I wanted Houston to be the main focus in the web application which was the following URL.

4. Now fire up Fluid.

5. Insert the URL you want to convert, give the application a name, and a icon (if you want, otherwise it will pull the favicon from the website URL)

6. Now just hit create and your application should look like the one below I made for the weather app. Simple as that, place the new app in your dock or wherever you want.

Note: You can also make the app part of your desktop, by going to your newly created app and converting it to an embedded SSB. Here is a Youtube video link for more instruction regarding SSBs.

Evernote, sync your notes across all your devices

Jason Mohan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:25:05 +0000

Notes we all have them, and need them. We use them to put our serials numbers, grocery items, reminders, and etc. However the biggest problem I’ve always had was how to keep them all in sync, and do it cheap (and by cheap I mean free). I needed a way to access my notes from my mac, windows machine, iphone, and the web. Well low and behold I found Evernote. This software is probably one of the best I ever seen. It’s free, but there is a paid version if you want to take notes, via voice, web site, it’s all based on the amount of data you need stored. However so far I’ve been using it free, and haven’t had to upgrade to the paid version. So if you are looking for a note syncing application check out Evernote. It syncs with the below devices, and OS.

Mobile Devices

Blackberry

Android

iPhone

Windows

Mac

Convert Youtube videos to mp3

Jason Mohan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:38:16 +0000

Have you ever wanted to convert a youtube video into an mp3 file? Well you can now, there is a firefox plugin that lets you do this easily. It adds a link below the youtube video you are watching, which you click on the link it bascially converts the video into an mp3. It works like this, it take the URL of the video you are watching, and sends it to a webservice which converts the file into a mp3, and allows you to download it easily. The only downside there maybe a few ads to watch while the file is being converted by the webservice. However that’s a little price to pay for a pretty decent quality conversion from an youtube video to an mp3. Check out there site here, and details about the firefox plugin. I’ve used it, and love it. http://www.video2mp3.net/firefox_addon.php.

Rename a file with a date/time stamp

Jason Mohan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:33:56 +0000

The following code will allow you to rename a file to the date and time. Save this code in a batch file (in this example we’ll call it rename_it.cmd), then call it with the file that needs to be renamed. You can also download it here, rename_it.cmd.

Example: rename_it FILENAME.txt

@Echo OFF
TITLE DateName
REM DateName.CMD
REM takes a filename as %1 and renames as %1_YYMMDDHHMM
REM
REM ————————————————————-
IF %1.==. GoTo USAGE
Set CURRDATE=%TEMP%\CURRDATE.TMP
Set CURRTIME=%TEMP%\CURRTIME.TMP

DATE /T > %CURRDATE%
TIME /T > %CURRTIME%

Set PARSEARG=”eol=; tokens=1,2,3,4* delims=/, ”
For /F %PARSEARG% %%i in (%CURRDATE%) Do SET YYYYMMDD=%%l%%j%%k

Set PARSEARG=”eol=; tokens=1,2,3* delims=:, ”
For /F %PARSEARG% %%i in (%CURRTIME%) Do Set HHMM=%%i%%j%%k

Echo RENAME %1 %1_%MMDDYYYY%%HHMM%
RENAME %1 %YYYYMMDD%-%HHMM%_%1
GoTo END

:USAGE
GoTo END

:END
REM
TITLE Command Prompt

Send your events log to sql

Jason Mohan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:29:06 +0000

Recently I had to turning on auditing on a file server. However turning on auditing was fine but what to do with the logs. The max recommended size for logs are 65Mb. However within 4 hours I was hitting that 65MB limit, and my oldest logs would start erasing. There are some tools out there that can help you, but nothing beats building your own. While I was researching how to archive my logs in a format I want, I stumbled on LogParser by Microsoft. This tools allows you to save your logs to SQL, CSV, TXT and provides only the information you want. All I wanted archived was the date/time stamp, the user, and what they did. This tool helped me accomplish that. I highly recommend you try it, if you need to archive, or audit logs. Click here to download from Microsoft, or here LogParser.msi to download from this site. Below is a code I used to extract the security log with the time stamp, eventid, sid, and the message into a file.

LogParser “SELECT TimeGenerated, EventID, SID, Message INTO c:\temp\security.txt FROM \\SERVERNAME\security” -resolveSIDs:ON