3Com Switch find Uptime

We had another incident with our VoIP phones restarting on Friday. As part of my troubleshooting efforts I needed to be 100% certain that the POE switch providing power to our phone didn't reboot.

To start there is no display uptime command in the CLI. But if you run the display version command part of the output is "Switch 4500 PWR 50-Port uptime is 6 weeks, 5 days, 2 hours, 25 minutes". This is exactly what I was looking for!

It should also be noted that the web interface for the switch shows the uptime on the device summary page.

Locking Down Mozilla Firefox

One of the main draw backs to Mozilla Firefox from most corporate IT people is its inability to be locked down, or taken care of by Group Policy. While you cannot lock down Firefox from within Group Policy alone, you can script these fixes into place to lock settings down.

To start you will need a program to byte shift a config file so that Firefox can read it. I used Byte Shifter.exe. There are also websites that do it all in a browser, but I haven't used them.

You will also need to edit the all.js file in "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\greprefs\" to include:

pref("general.config.filename", "mozilla.cfg");

I put that line at the absolute bottom, but it might not matter where it goes.

To start create an empty file. I called mine mozilla.txt since the result file will be mozilla.cfg.

The file must start with // on its own line.

Add in any settings you want to lock down. You can peruse about:config for settings, and again after you lock them down to check for the "locked" option.

Below is my mozilla.txt file, with host names changed to protect the innocent. I have included comments (They start with //) to explain things a bit further.

//

//Lock the option for startup page. 0 = "Show a blank page", 1 = "Show my home page", and 3 = " Show my windows and tabs from last time"

lockPref("browser.startup.page", 1);

//Set the home page. Use a pipe to include many home pages as tabs.

lockPref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.mysuperawesomecompany.com|https://mail.google.com");

//Set the browser history to something a bit longer than the default 7 days.

lockPref("browser.history_expire_days", 90);

lockPref("browser.history_expire_days.mirror", 90);

// Clean up certain things every time Firefox shuts down. This keeps things clean and running smooth for us, your results may very.

lockPref("privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown", true);

//We do not want to clear the history on shutdown.

lockPref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.history", false);

lockPref("privacy.item.history", false);

//We can clean up the downloads history. I have seen things get really slow if this doesn't happen.

lockPref("privacy.item.downloads", true);

//Clear the cache.

lockPref("privacy.item.cache", true);

//Clean up cookies.

lockPref("privacy.item.cookies", true);

//Remove any session info.

lockPref("privacy.item.sessions", true);

//We do not want to keep passwords saved.

lockPref("privacy.item.passwords", true);

//Do not prompt to do this, just do it.

lockPref("privacy.sanitize.promptOnSanitize", false);

lockPref("signon.rememberSignons", true);

//Do not allow the "Show passwords" button.

lockPref("pref.privacy.disable_button.view_passwords", true);

//Don't use a proxy.

lockPref("network.proxy.type", 0);

//We keep one version of Firefox for a while. The newest version breaks things in our application, so we currently need to just run what we have.

lockPref("app.update.enabled", false);

//Disable extensions.

lockPref("config.lockdown.disable_extensions", true);

//Disable themes.

lockPref("config.lockdown.disable_themes", true);

//Show the downloads window when downloading a file.

lockPref("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", false);

//Close the downloads window when all downloads are done.

lockPref("browser.download.manager.closeWhenDone", true);

//Save files to:

lockPref("browser.download.useDownloadDir", true);

lockPref("browser.download.dir", "c:\\%homepath%\\Desktop");

lockPref("browser.download.downloadDir", "c:\\%homepath%\\Desktop");

lock{ref("browser.download.folderList", 2);

//Always ask me where to save files.

lockPref("browser.download.useDownloadDir", false);

//Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser.

lockPref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);

//New pages should open in a new window.

lockPref("browser.link.open_external", 2);

lockPref("browser.link.open_newwindow", 2);

//New pages should open in a new tab.

lockPref("browser.link.open_external", 1);

lockPref("browser.link.open_newwindow", 1);

//Warn me when closing multiple tabs.

lockPref("browser.tabs.warnOnClose", false);

//Warn me when openining multiple tabs might slow down Firefox.

lockPref("browser.tabs.warnOnOpen", false);

//Always show the tab bar.

lockPref("browser.tabs.autoHide", false);

//When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately.

lockPref("browser.tabs.loadInBackground", false);

//Block pop-up windows.

lockPref("dom.disable_open_during_load", false);

//Load images automatically. 1 = check 2 = unchecked.

lockPref("permissions.default.image", 2);

//enable JavaScript.

lockPref("javascript.enabled", true);

//Some of the advanced JavaScript options.

//Disable the Advanced Button.

lockPref("pref.advanced.javascript.disable_button.advanced", true);

//Move or resize existing windows.

lockPref("dom.disable_window_move_resize", true);

//Raise or lower windows.

lockPref("dom.disable_windows_flip", false);

//Disable or replace context menus.

lockPref("dom.event.contextmenu.enabled", false);

//Hide the status bar.

lockPref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.status", false);

//Enable Java.

lockPref("security.enable_java", false);

Of course there are others and many more settings, but that covers a good number of them. Also I have only tested this on our version of Firefox, which is 2.0.0.20.

Powershell: Process contents of Directory

Hello!  I know it has been a while since I posted any thing.  I have been busy working on a lot of different projects and I picked up a second job so that has been keeping me busy as well.  

Todays post is mostly some powershell code to process Microsoft Document Imaging Files (.mdi or .tif) and converting them to PDF's using a program called MDI2PDF from Bugysoft.  

Part of our specific problem is these files are really Microsoft Document Imaging Files but they have the .tif file extenstion.  We wrote a PHP script to process all of our uploads from the one client that sends us these files and based on some tests we put the MDI Files into a specific directory for processing.

And now on to the Code.  Lines that start with a # are comments for explaining what each line / section does.

#Setting up variables for our use

         $input = "y:\allAuths\problemAuths\"

         $output = "y:\allAuths\processAuths\"

         $convert = "C:\Program Files\MDIConvertor\MDI2PDF.exe"

#Get the current number of errors present in the global $error variable.

     $olderrorcount = $error.count

#Check to see if MDI2PDF is running. If it is this script will fail, so we need to kill it.

       $proclist = get-process mdi2pdf -ea silentlycontinue

#If the number of errors is the same as is used to be then we can kill the running process(es).  Otherwise we have nothing to kill and continue on.

    if ($error.couint -eq $olderrorcount) {$proclist | stop-process}

#Here we get the contents of the input directory filtered for the type of file we want to convert.

      $filelist = get-childitem -Path $input -Filter *.tif

#For every file in our file list we need to run the following command in order from top to bottom.

     foreach ($file in $filelist)

     {

#Replaces the .tif with .pdf.

          $filename=$file -replace ($file.extension + "`$"),".pdf"

#Write something to the screen so the user knows something is happening.

       write-host "Converting $input$file"

#Look ma! Simple string concatenation!!!

#Roughly equal to &"C:\program files\mdiconvertor\mdi2pdf.exe export:y:\allauths\problemauths\.tif y:\allauths\processauths\.tif.pdf

         &$convert "export:$input$file $output$filename"

#get the process info for the currently running mdi2pdf process.

     $convertprocess = get-process mdi2pdf

#Wait for the process to exit before moving on to the next one. I used to use sleep 10 here but this is much better.

      $convertprocess.waitforexit()

#We need to check and make sure the converted file exists. If it does exist then we need to delete the original file.

    #variable to store the input filename. We will need this later to delete the file.

    $inputfile = $file.fullname

    #Variable to store the output filename and full path.  We use this later to check for its existance.

    $outputfile = $output + $filename

            #If the result of the path test is true we remove the file.

            if (test-path $outputfile)

            {remove-item $inputfile}

    }

PowerPoint Presentation Humor

PowerPoint Presentation Humor, just something a little different, but funny if you have ever worked with PowerPoint or been to a meeting.