I regularly suggest AVG as a free anti-virus solution. I have actively used it for well over 8 years now and have never found myself struck by a virus it couldn’t clean or stop.
Recently two annoyances have crept into AVG. The first is easily solvable, a corrupt update.
If you get a message saying “Invalid update control CTF file”. This means that AVG has found that its update file is corrupt. The quickest way to sort this is to delete the update files:
- Open the “AVG User Interface”
- Tools > Advanced settings (via the menus)
- Then “Update” and “Manage”
- Press “Delete temporary update files”
- Run the update again.
Easy enough to fix.
The second annoyance is the Link Scanner. I can understand what it is attempting to do but in my preference I do not wish AVG to add additional traffic to my already clogged internet connection! The trick to sorting this is to remove the link scanner at installation. This might mean uninstalling AVG to reinstall but to get rid of Link Scanner its worth it. Simply select a “Custom installation” and then when it gets to “Component Selection” uncheck LinkScanner .. done!
One of the things that truly gets on my nerves is the way that ISPs are allowed to sell connections. The now ubiquotious up to. Surely someone in government or the ASA can do something about this nonsense. Up to 8M, in reality probably around 6 if you are lucky, more like 4 for the mass. It’s a horrible thing, really I would like to see them reverse the promise, at least 4M. That way you know you will not drop below that.
But now its got worse, not only do they see these unobtainable rates, now the rates you get will be constricted at “peak times” (which basically means whenever you except to use the internet). So not only do they sell rates they will not provide but they go further and restrict the rates when you want to use it. These so called “unlimited” packages all of a sudden have a limit.
The final thing that annoys me is that ISPs will reduce the cost of their packages, offer more and more options to their packages and completely neglect their existing customers. I find myself browsing the website of my ISP every 6 months just to make sure they aren’t overcharging me.
Why is noone outraged like me about this? Why is the government not stepping in and kicking the ISPs in the teeth for this abuse of its customers. Tools like iPlayer from the BBC depend on good solid rates and you’re not going to get them any time soon in the UK.
There I’ve said it now. There is nothing wrong the Rar format, it may even been slightly better at compressing that Zip. So why does it suck then, the algorithm for creating a Rar file is proprietary, this means that no other applications are able to create Rar files other than the RARLabs tools (WinRAR etc). So everytime you see a Rar file you know that WinRAR was behind its creation.
Now look at say Zip, the format is just as capable of compression as Rar. The algorithm for creating and unpacking Zip files is Free! This means anyone can make a program that compresses Zip files, anyone can make a program that unpacks Zip files.
I would push you all to consider the utilities you use and look to see if they are truely free. For every program we support that isn’t free we dimish the OSS movement just that little bit.
Exchange is a massive enterprise tool and as such you’d expect it to provide a simple method for restoring mail folders. No such luck! Instead a restore on exchange is quite a long process.
First up you need to discover the storage group that your mailbox is in. This requires a quick search on an active directory server. Once you have that you can go on to create a ‘recovery storage group’ linking it to the correct storage group.
Then you start up your TSM restore and recover the storage group (we use TSM as our backup). On our setup that means that you are restoring approximately 20Gb of data. Once thats done (it can take a while), we can then mount the recovery group. At this point we are left with one of two options: copy all the mail and folders into your existing mail account effectively doubling your mail, or you can merge the contents back into your mail so only copying what is missing.
My issue is that neither of these options are really what a use wants. If we copy the mail back, then we effectively double the amount of mail that a user has. If we merge the data back, it can merge e-mails back into folders that maybe the user will not look at, thus leaving behind stray meant-to-be-deleted e-mails. Nine times out of ten all the user has lost is a single folder or a single mail.
The solution to this is to add another step into the process, extract the mailbox from the recovery group into a PST file, then merge the folder out of the PST file back into the mailbox in the main storage group. But even here there is a problem, if you don’t know the exact folder name you can’t find out what it is and therefore cannot restore it.
In reality what is needed here is a solution that allows the administrators the ability to extract individual folders within a mailbox. It is obvious that the exchange restores are built with the intent of only being used in a situation of disaster, total loss of a storage group or something similar. However almost all the restores undertaken will be for single users.
Looking back to the old method we used with exim makes this look even more silly. As there we could simply find the file representing the mail folder and restore it. Done!