Installing additional skins in CKEditor 4.x

CKEditor is one of the most sophisticated webbrowser base html editors available.
The original version was named fckeditor and going to version 3 it was renamed to be simply ckeditor.

The F in the name was for the first name of the author, Frederico.

When you use the version 4 of the editor, you will receive a new look, due to large changes in the default skin. It is now blackgray/white instead of the "colorful" 3.x version.
A huge improvement in my opinion. The bright colors in 3.x where not looking very professional.

If for some reasons you wish to use another skin, then you can download alternate skins from the ckeditor home page with this link.
When downloading, it tells you how to install and activate the new skin.
Unfortunally this info is mostly wrong, and even in the main documentation the same errors are present.

To successfully install the new skin, you have to put the extracted files in the skins subdirectory (not in the plugins).
And to activate the new skin, you have to specify the config.skin = "new_skin" property. (And not the config.extraPlugin as documented).

So if you wish to have the "old" 3.x icons and colors, you can download the "kama" skin and activate it.

Fix orphan users in MS SQL Server after restore

When you restore a MS SQL Server to a different machine, you might expect orphan users.
This also happens when you detach a database and then attach it on another server.

You see the users in the Security->Users section of the sql server and also in the database itself, but you can't login with it.

The problem is, that MS SQL stores the SID along the users, and when you restore it on another MS SQL server the link between user names and SID won't match any longer.

Fixing this via GUI is unfortunally not possible, when you try to map the user it trys to create a new sql user and fails, because there already exists such a user.

Fortunally there are a few stored procedures (available since sql 2000 version) which help you fix the logins.

First, make sure that this is the problem. This will lists the orphaned users:

EXEC sp_change_users_login 'Report'

If you already have a login id and password for this user, fix it by doing:

EXEC sp_change_users_login 'Auto_Fix', 'user'

If you want to create a new login id and password for this user, fix it by doing:

EXEC sp_change_users_login 'Auto_Fix', 'user', 'login', 'password'

Install teamviewer 8 under linux for unattended access

Teamviewer is a great software for remote support.
 When your partner has internet access and a GUI available, you can use it to do maintenance work from anywhere in the world and via most of the devices available today. (SMartphones, tables, etc.)

With version 8 they did introduce the unattended access for linux systems too.
Unfortunally the installation routine does not always register the services correctly, so you can't access the remote system.

Fortunally there is a simple fix which works under ubuntu (and most debian based systems)

Just create a service entry yourself and set it to autostart, just as mentioned below:

cd /opt/teamviewer8/tv_bin/script
sudo cp teamviewerd.sysv /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/teamviewerd.sysv
sudo update-rc.d teamviewerd.sysv defaults

With this in place you can now access the teamviewer instance on the linux system too.

Outlook 2010 does not send emails with exchange server

Outlook 2010 and 2013 have a realy nasty bug.

The effect when connected to a exchange server shows up in the inability to send out emails.
Incomming mails in cached mode just work fine, and outlook tells us in the status bar "Connected to server".

When you write a mail, it just gets stuck in the outbox and tells us about a communication error with error code 0x8004011D, meaning that the server is not available.
Just plain rubish, otherwise we would not have incomming mails and in the status bar it would not show "Connected to server"

When you create a new profile for the user, it works a few days, until again it blocks at this point.
When you create a profile without cached mode, it will work with no problems as well, but that's not the intention to have a cached mode.

The solution to this mistery are linked mailboxes.
When you create a profile and add the linked mailboxes as independent account's in outlook, you will get in troubles. It looks like outlook internally adds the linked mailboxes to the profile too, and then has double accounts and messes up things.

The solution is simple: Just remove the additional mailboxes from the outlook profile and mails will be sent out just as you would expect.

Ever needed to convert a VHD file to a real harddisk?

You probably know the scenario:

The client has started a small project and needed a new server for this.

In these days you useally go for a VM running on a server, and (since it uses few resources) you place the disk content of that VM into a file in the filesystem.
Since it's a small project with small load this is the ideal (cheapest) solution.

A few months later, you realize that this project is not as small as the customer tolds you or is requiring more and more storage place.

So you add more physical disks to the server and make a dedicated mirrored drive for that (once small) VM.

And now you have to transfer the content of the VHD file into the real disk, so you can directly access it with best performance from the VM.
Since MS did not provide a tool for this conversion, you need another tool for it.

There are serveral of them, the simplest GUI tool is Vhd2disk from Sysinternals.

Here is the link to the forum with the download links.

The conversion is very simple, just make sure to select the correct target disk, otherwise you will miss some other data!

Once restored you can change the disk in the Hype-V manager and (if required) expand the volume(s) to take advantage of the additional space.

SQL 2012 Server fails in Windows Update with error 84C4000E

About two years ago I posted a entry about SQL2008R2 failing in installing updates via Windows Update.

http://techtuxwords.blogspot.ch/2011/09/ms-sql-server-2008-r2-sp1-fails-with.html

As you can see, the very same happens with SQL 2012 server, the reason is again the very same issue.
So you have to again change the locale to installing the update, and then you can switch back afterwards.

Why a fat GIT repository is a bad idea

When using distributed versioning systems like GIT or Mercury, the size of a repository matters.
For users who only know GIT/Mercurial this might be obvious.
But if you previously used a server based VCS (like Subversion etc.) then this might be interesting to know.

When you use GIT or Mercury to replicate changes, you always send then whole repository file, and this repository file contains all versions/branches etc. So the repository file is quickli becoming large.

When using subversion, the server part handles all the merges/versioning etc.
The client receives/sends only small deltas to/from the server.

So for GIT and Mercurial, make a repository for each subproject and for each "focus"

You can read the full article at dzone

http://java.dzone.com/articles/git-happy-repository