Bohack

Again I find myself wiring up T1 circuits for a Telco provider that my company is going to use. I also find myself scouring the Internet for color codes for the T1 cable at the “Smart Jack”. The smart jack is where the demarcation point or demarc resides. So what is a demarc and what exactly is the smart jack… The demarc is where the Telco ends their responsibility and yours begins. The Telco needs a way to start your responsibility for wiring and internal maintenance, that is the threshold of the demarc. The smart-jack is a way that the phone company can loop or loopback the signal so that they can remotely check that everything is OK on their side.

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Toying around I needed to query XML from VBScript and parse it out for only the elements I needed. So I wrote a VBScript and figured I would share it. Many posts out there just load a file rather than a URL, this script will do both and I simplified it a bit.

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Well you really can’t find out where someone lives exactly, only the phone company can tell you that and that information is confidential. However you can find which town someone lives in using the NPA/NXX database. The North America Numbering Plan was first introduced in 1947 and adopted by AT&T in 1951. The NANP was made to simplify and speed up long distance calls or calls that needed to leave the Central Office they originated from. That is where ‘Mabel’ would get on and you would ask to connect to Bayside-0213, Bayside was the central office or ’229′ b=2 a=2 y=9 or you could ask for 229-0123. The letters on the phone are there for a reason and that was when the NANP came into existence.

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I was currently working on a VBScript to pull some information from a web page. So decided to build a function for it, so that it can be reused over and over again in other scripts. It uses the XMLHTTP library to query a URL and return the elements, I just ask for the responsetext and return it.

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Microsoft Search should not be feared, it is now an optional install from Microsoft Update Services. It is integrates into Office 2007 for email search capability. However one problem is it changes the default search of Windows Explorer to Desktop Search. So it has pissed off a lot of people and made them uninstall it. There is hope and a way to switch it back.

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Lots of time I have web pages performing complex functions and want to make sure that they execute without a problem. A problem would be they just take too damn long and time out when put under a load. This is the problem when things don’t scale properly, they just get really slow. So in order to gauge how long a page takes to load we really need a stop watch. Luckily we the components of one…

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When upgrade from Exchange 2000 or 2003 to Exchange 2007 you must perform a transition. Mainly because you can not upgrade the binaries on the Exchange 2003 box to 2007, 2003 is 32 bit and 2007 is 64 bit. During the transition you will need to have the 2003 Exchange Routing Group connected to the 2007 Exchange Routing Group. This will allow you to delever mail to recipients on both platforms and keep business continuity. You connect the two with a Routing Group Connector and I advise you use the Exchange Manager Console to manage them.

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I am starting to warm up to Exchange 2007 and found that anything and everything can be fixed through the Exchange Management Shell. Recently I transitioned an Exchange 2003 administrative group to Exchange 2007. After migrating the users from the Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, I decided to check to see if creating a mailbox is the same. So I opened the (ADUC) Active Directory Users and Computers MMC and ran through the creation of a new user and mailbox. When I went back to the Exchange Management Console the “Recipient Type Details” showed as “Legacy Mailbox”.

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In part 1 of the Xbox Media Center article I explained the hardware modifications, basically the mod chip installation. The purpose of the mod chip installation is so that you can use unlocked hard drives in the xbox. The locking mechanism of the ATA specification was to stop people from poking around with the contents of the drive. Even after unlocking the hard drive the format of the drive is not FAT or any recognizable partition scheme. The second reason for a mod chip is to load an alternate dashboard or the software you see when you start it up. The third reason for the mod chip is large drive support, the original xbox comes with only an 8GB hard drive.

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To kick the new year off right I am sharing a strategy to fight SPAM and email annoyances; it is a common sense approach to SPAM. This concept I can not take full credit from, although I can no longer find the original source to cite; so I will take credit for it now. If you can find the original cite, please post it in the comments; I only remember it was a security consortium and it was in their best practices (circa 1990).

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