Removing Hidden Network Adapters from Windows

Windows device manager does not always allow you to see old adapters once the hardware has been removed. You can enable it to do so but when you are dealing with large numbers of virtual machines you need another approach. Devcon can enable you to do this and can be found here if you are after the 32bit version. However there is no 64bit version (just the 32bit & itanium version).
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Excel Slow at Opening Documents over the Network

Recently I have seen Microsoft Office 2003 taking an age to open Excel documents over the network. You can use Wireshark to see what is happening at the network level: You can see that it is opening the file a teeny tiny piece at a time. This can cause quite a delay as the spreadsheet gets larger. It turns out that it had been caused by an update to Excel called ‘Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in’:
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Finding the Functional Levels of Active Directory

There a quite a few ways of finding the Fuctional levels of Active Directory. Dsquery is a good option as it usually is distributed with windows. This will give you the Domain Functional Level: dsquery * DC=DOMAIN, DC=LOCAL -scope base -attr msDS-Behavior-Version ntMixedDomain Replace DOMAIN and LOCAL with your directory details. You can check the result with the following table: 0, 0 Windows 2000 Native domain Level 0, 1 Windows 2000 Mixed domain Level 2, 0 Windows 2003 Domain Level 3, 0 Windows 2008 Domain Level 4, 0 Windows 2008 R2 Domain Level To find the Active Directory Schema Version:
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Quickly find FSMO Roles

Use netdom to find where the current FSMO roles are assigned in Active Directory: netdom query fsmo This will return something like: Schema master DC01.local Domain naming master DC02.local PDC DC01.local RID pool manager DC02.local Infrastructure master DC01.local The command completed successfully. The ‘netdom query’ command can also return other useful information. Valid types include: Server, Workstation, DC, OU and Trust
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Removing/Uninstalling Xcode

Just run the following from a terminal: sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all This is quite old, these days you should just be able to delete the Xcode app.
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Enable Non-Root Network Traffic Capture in Wireshark in Linux

Install wireshark as normal then run: sudo setcap ‘CAP_NET_RAW+eip CAP_NET_ADMIN+eip’ /usr/bin/dumpcap Then run wireshark and check that you can see your local interfaces. This has been tested in Ubuntu 11.04
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Converting Audio for Use as Mitel Hold Music

The music file has to be A-law or U-law or G.711 at 8 khz, 8 Bits, Mono. To do this you can either use sox or ffmpeg. To use sox: sox -V input_file.wav -A -c 1 -r 8k -1 output.wav``` Update: Seems some of these options are depreciated, if you run sox with the previous options you get: sox WARN sox: Option -A' is deprecated, use -e a-law' instead. sox WARN sox: Option -1' is deprecated, use -b 8' instead.
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Converting an Ovf Template to run in VMware Fusion

VMware has a tool called ovftool. You need to do a full, custom install of Fusion to get the ovf tool. It is located in: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool Change to this directory and run the following to see examples: ./ovftool –help examples``` To run a basic conversion use: ./ovftool path_to_ovf_file.ovf /output_directory/ This will convert the ovf into a format that Fusion can try to boot. This will not enable a virtual machine with incompatable hardware to boot.
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Resuming Partial Downloads

You can use curl to do this: curl -L -o partial_download -C - http://path_to/partial_download This does require resume support on the server side
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Convert a Folder into an ISO on the Mac

Open up the terminal on the mac and use the following: hdiutil makehybrid -o image_name.iso folder_name Where folder_name is the folder you want to convert to an ISO.
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