Screen rotation in Windows 7

I learned a new trick today that I want to pass along.  Have you ever had some joker in the office mess with your machine when you’ve stepped away without locking your system?  One of the worst is when someone goes into the video settings and rotates your screen 90 degrees.  You could either rotate your head or turn your mouse sideways or maybe even physically rotate your screen so you can set it back to normal.  But there is an easier way with a keyboard shortcut.  Simply hold down Ctrl and Alt and then push the UP arrow key.  The other arrow keys will rotate your screen left, right, or upside down.  This should stop the joker from pulling this prank.  Better yet, if you have an office joker and he leaves his machine unlocked, just walk by and give him a quick Crtl, Alt arrow of your choice.  Just beware the repercussions, and always use the Windows Key + L when you step away from your computer.

Removing a DPM recovery point

We had a situation where we needed to delete a recovery point.  Of course there is no way to do it using the GUI and Technet has an awesome (useless) explanation on how to do it using powershell

After a little searching I found this blog entry which works perfectly.  In short here are the steps for removing a recovery point.  As some point I may write an interactive script to simplify everything.  I modified the code from the original blog posting to add the array number in front of the output to make things a little easier.

Get a list of protection groups and display them.

$pgList = get-protectiongroup SERVERNAME

$i=0;foreach($pg in $pgList){write-host (“{0} : {1}” -f $i, $pg.friendlyname);$i++}

Get a list of data sources for the protection group you want (replace the x with the number next to the protection group) and display them.

$dsList = get-datasource $pglist[x]

$i=0;foreach($ds in $dsList){write-host (“{0} : {1}” -f $i, $ds.name);$i++}

Next, get a list of recovery points for the data source (replace the x again).

$rpList = get-recoverypoint $dslist[x]

$i=0;foreach($rp in $rpList){write-host (“{0} : {1}” -f $i, $rp.representedpointintime);$i++}

Now we are at the point where we can actually remove the recovery point.

remove-recoverypoint -recoverypoint $rpList[x] -confirm

Thanks again to the original blog poster.

Got an e-mail from my garage door

It said it was open for 5 minutes as a warning to let me know that I might have forgotten to close it.  Actually I had purposefully left it open to test a device I built based on a couple blog entries from Richard L. Lynch.  Now I don’t know Richard, but I found his postings when searching for a solution to absent mindedly leaving the garage door open.  Since we have smart phones on us at all times, a simple e-mail from the garage door would be great if it was open for too long.  Richard came up with an elegant solution using a Raspberry Pi and a small Python program hooked up to a garage door sensor.  The posts could use some updates for the current Raspberry Pi model B+ but they work.  Here are the 2 posts by Richard.

http://www.richlynch.com/2013/07/27/pi_garage_alert_1/

http://www.richlynch.com/2013/08/04/pi_garage_alert_2/

You won’t need to USB hub with the B+ model since it has plenty of USB ports.  I used CAT 5 cable to connect the sensor to the Pi in the basement.  I chose the basement to mount the Pi since it will be out of the elements and kept cool for the most part.

I’m planning on getting another Pi so I can load Mono on it and write the code in C# which is what I’m used to.

Can rotation

Something I’m bad about is rotating canned goods. After looking around I found a company that sells some cardboard ones here: http://canorganizer.com/ I also found some made of plastic and full blown metal ones here: http://www.thrivelife.com/food-rotation-systems   I wanted something strong but didn’t want to spend a ton of money either so I came up with my own plan.

I still have a couple more to make. For anyone else who has some woodworking skills and wants to make some the plans I used are all included below with lots of pictures.

Slash key in Excel

It took me a while to find this so I decided to make an entry here in case anyone else runs across this problem.  I’m working on a spreadsheet for IP address management and have have a column for the CIDR.  /26 for example.  The problem is that as soon as you hit the / key  a bunch of letters pop up over the ribbon.  The same thing happens when you hit the Alt key.  To stop this click File | Options | Advanced and scroll all the way down to Lotus Compatibility and you’ll see Microsoft Excel menu key.  Remove the / in that box and click OK.  Now you can type a / in a cell without the keyboard menu popping up.

Enable console messages on vty lines

I always have a hard time finding this.  Every once in a while I’d like to see the console messages when I’m remotely managing a switch via SSH (or Telnet).  The command is simply “terminal monitor”.  This only lasts for the current session but that isn’t a big deal.

Duplicate MAC addresses in Hyper-V

We had some strange, seemingly random, things happening in our environment lately, but have had a hard time tracking down what was going on. We run a Hyper-V environment consisting of 3 host servers in a failover cluster with Server 2008R2 and an iSCSI SAN. The other day I noticed we were running out of room on our PRTG server (virtualized). When I initially created that server and setup PRTG I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into the configuration and just installed everything using defaults. The default setting puts all the data on the C drive. To fix this I created a new volume on the SAN, added two new network adapters to the PRTG server, configured everything and moved the data to the new volume. The next day we noticed a bunch of errors with iSCSI connections dropping on a different server.

Cisco Jumbo frame setting

Here is a little tidbit to remember. I was configuring a switch for a new iSCSI SAN install. To make it easier I was copying configuration settings from an existing SAN switch when I noticed there was nothing setting the Jumbo frames to 9000. I verified everything was ok on the production network by using ping, setting the size, and telling it not to fragment. I then used a show system MTU command and the switch shows Jumbo MTU set to 9000. I little searching online and I found that Cisco switches don’t store the Jumbo frame setting in the configuration file. Here is the quote from the Cisco documentation:

The system MTU setting is saved in the switch environmental variable in NVRAM and becomes effective when the switch reloads. Unlike the system MTU routing configuration, the MTU settings you enter with the system mtu and system mtu jumbo commands are not saved in the switch Cisco IOS configuration file, even if you enter the copy running-config startup-config privileged EXEC command. Therefore, if you use TFTP to configure a new switch by using a backup configuration file and want the system MTU to be other than the default, you must explicitly configure the system mtu and system mtu jumbo settings on the new switch and then reload the switch.

Reminder of the incandescent light bulb ban

Just a quick reminder to pickup whatever stock you think you might need.  Reference this post https://murison.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/incandescent-light-bulb-ban/

I was just at the store and there are no 100W or 75W bulbs to be found.  Good supply of 60W for now.

I’ve gone to LED for the can lights in the kitchen and they work great.  There is a fraction of a second delay between turning on the switch and the light coming on, but they come on at full brightness so I can deal with that.  Slowly working on replacing all the CFL flood light bulbs with LEDs.  LED prices are still too high for all the fixtures in the house so I’ve stocked up with a supply that should last about a decade.  By that time the price should be better, or I will have won the lottery 🙂

Printer supply monitoring with SNMP and PRTG

I finally found a simple to use but very powerful network monitoring package. All I wanted was something like MRTG to tell me how much bandwidth was being used on our WAN links. Because of our strict security requirements we were not allowed to use MRTG. I stumbled across PRTG Network Monitor and it worked perfectly for showing network bandwidth. After digging through it a bit more I found that it could do much more. I am now using it to monitor all the hardware on our network. From routers and switches to servers and SANs. Today I was able to configure monitoring for all our printers, including toner levels. The hardest part with the printers was finding the correct MIBs. Hopefully this post will help the next person.