Sep 28, 2011

How to point Trend OfficeScan clients to new server

After losing our Trend OfficeScan/WSUS/Intranet/App server in an unfortunate idiot accident our department was left with the scattered remains. We had to install OfficeScan on a new server and update the client machines to reflect the new hostname and port settings. A quick and dirty solution was to use PsExec and execute the Trend IpXfer.exe tool. And Im all about quick and dirty :) First I copied the IpXfer tool to our domain controller netlogon folder. This will ensure that clients choose the closest DC to execute IpXfer.
I then ran the following command : psexec \\* -u domain\administrator -p yourpw "\\domain.co.za\netlogon\trend client update\ipxfer.exe" -s trendserverip -p 8080

PsExec will now merrily enumerate your domain and update your OfficeScan clients. Don't worry if you see an "Error code 0 exit" error, the clients should still update. You have the option of specifying a file with a list of IPs or single hosts if the big bang approach is too cavalier for you.

Hope this saves someone some time...sometime.

Sep 14, 2011

Best colour laser printer for printing x-rays?

Does anyone out there have experience in implementing a paper printing solution for a busy radiology department? Any pitfalls to avoid? I'm currently looking at a couple of options, notably Xerox and HP but if you can make any other suggestions I would really appreciate it.

Mar 15, 2011

iPad iOS 4.3 update problems

I recent got an iPad for a work project - as if I was going to pay for it myself... Today I tried to update its iOS version to 4.3. After numerous failed attempts through iTunes (kept on getting a 9006 unspecified error of some sorts), I found a link to a forum where many fellow South Africans complained about the same issue.

I followed the instructions and finally got iOS upgraded. You can download the 4.3 file from:

One thing to note though, the update will download a .zip file. Simply rename the extension to .ipsw and proceed with the manual update.

Feb 7, 2011

C# & Outlook: Insert image in email body

Haven't posted in a while...I blame it on being lazy. Which is not a bad thing, I always maintain a lazy IT guy is a damn effective IT guy. But I'm veering off topic now.

Figured something out today that might be useful. As you may know there are a few ways of sending mail with your C# app. You can use straight SMTP or you can integrate with various other email clients. The nice feature of the latter method being you'll have a record of the email in your Sent Items. By the way I use Outlook 2007 so for the purpose of this article. Setting up the basic integration is pretty easy so I'm gonna skip that - have a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310262 for info on how it works. Make sure you use an HTML body type. My problem was getting an image (in my case, logo) into the body of the email. It turned out to be as easy as referencing an image in the file system in an img tag, for example:

<img src="" + Application.StartupPath + "\Images\logo.png" + "" align='baseline' border='0' />

Till next time, whenever that may be.

Oct 15, 2010

Visual Studio Express hangs!

I run VS C# 2010. For some reason my IDE started hanging for 2 minutes every time I start to debug as well as when I exit my app. I didn't encounter any problems when running the app from install. Before I Googled it, I just deleted the contents of the debug and release folders which sorted out the problem. My guess is vshost, used during debugging, somehow got corrupted.
Hope it works for you.