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Showing posts from 2012

Mexicali Chili

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1 lb lean ground beef 1 medium onion, diced 1 14oz can chili beans 1 16oz jar corn salsa 3 large Idaho potatoes, diced 3 cups water 2 cups cold milk 2 tbl corn starch Brown beef, season with 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp chili powder if desired. Sweat onion in 1 tbl butter separately. Mix beef, onion, beans, salsa, potatoes and water in large pot. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Mix milk and cornstarch in small bowl. When potatoes are tender, slowly stir in milk mixture. Mix for a minute or so as the chili thickens. Serve with diced avacado, tomato, and maybe some feta? Enjoy, we did!

Crystal Reports Server 2008, WACS and AD Auth on 2008 Domain

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Image via CrunchBase This was kicking my butt the past couple of days. Up to this point, I'd simply been using the server to schedule and email reports out to people. What I wanted was to allow users to log in with their AD credentials, browse InfoView and run their own reports. Simple, right? This is how I did it. Create a service account in AD. This account doesn't need elevated privileges  Tick the User cannot change password and Password never expires boxes. In my example the account is svc_crs . Use setspn.exe to create the Service Principal Name. Run the command on a DC in a command prompt with elevated privileges. Here is more info on setspn . The convention is setspn -a MySpnName/MySvcAcct.Domain.Com MySvcAcct . In my environment I used setspn.exe -a  CrystalSvr/svc_crs.NETWORK.INTERNAL svc_crs . Open your service account Account Properties in Active Directory Users and Computers , select the Delegation tab, and change delegation to Trust this user for

New Sourcegforge Project

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English: jQuery Mobile logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I just posted a new project on Sourceforge , called Anonymous Compliance Reporting . Anonymous Compliance Reporting aims to be a solution for small organizations that desire to adhere to the corporate practice of providing a means for employees to report issues anonymously. This project originated to provide a mechanism for my employers staff to report instances of compliance violation in the workplace, e.g. improper handling of PHI (Patient Health Information ), HIPAA violations, and the like. I took on the task of updating it recently, to a more robust " Web 2.0 " application, adding JQuery , Ajax, and updated graphics. It runs on both LAMP and WAMP servers. Documentation is on this wiki  https://sourceforge.net/p/anonrep/wiki/Home/  and in the README file in the download package. The sample website is completely open to play with, the credentials are admin / password. Have fun! Anonymous Compli

ADFS and AD User Name Changes

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One of our users was recently married, and had her name changed. Two days later she opened a helpdesk ticket indicating one of our claims aware applications denied her access to it's resources. After enabling ADFS debug logging, I discovered that the server was still referencing her old user name . After a few minutes of Googling, I found this article that points to a MS KB article outlining the use of LSA caching user SID's, creating my problem. A quick Powershell script keeps this from happening again after creating the registry key noted in the KB article: $RegKey="HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa" Set-ItemProperty -path $RegKey -name LsaLookupCacheMaxSize -value 0 Set-ItemProperty -path $RegKey -name LsaLookupCacheMaxSize -value 128

Easy CSV import into Oracle

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English: The logo of Oracle Corporation de:Bild:Oracle-Logo.svg he:תמונה:Oracle Logo.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The easiest way I've found to import text data sources into Oracle have been using the Microsoft SQL Server Import and Export Wizard that comes with Standard, Enterprise or Developer editions of MS SQL Server. Assuming you've got the Oracle database drivers installed, just right click a database from within SQL Server Management Studio, choose Tasks -> Import Data. As your datasource, choose your CSV or text file . After you've configured the specifics of your data source, you'll need to choose a destination. Choose the OLE DB Provider for Oracle, then click Properties. Instead of using your Server Name, enter the database instance name and the credentials.  Click Text Connection to be sure it is correct, and click Allow saving password. Click OK. Click Next. In the next window, choose the destination table you've

ADFS AutoCertificateRollover

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BITE (show) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Leaving your ADFS 2.0 installation in AutoCertificateRollover mode will most certainly bite you in the ass at some point. This is the default mode when you install ADFS, and when your certificate expires, you'll get something that looks like this: The key to your answer is in the first line: ID4175: The issuer of the security token was not recognized by the IssuerNameRegistry. All you need to do is insert the new thumbprint from your ADFS Token-signing certificate. Make sure it's all in uppercase, and you've not added any invalid character codes, or spaces in the thumbprint or you will continue to get this error message . You are better served by generating another certificate for a longer period than the default 1 year. You can easily do this by opening Windows PowerShell and issuing the following: First, add your snapin: Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Adfs.Powershell Show a list of your ADFS properties. Get-ADFSProperti

OpenAir ETL Project

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Image via CrunchBase Reporting in OpenAir has presented our company with some challenges. As such, I was asked to take a look at how we might be able to create an ETL of this data , create our reports and automatically distribute them to our project managers. This is how I did it. First we needed to purchase OpenAir's Automated Backup service. This service will export data in text format or MySQL dumps of any or all tables in their database, zip them up and deposit them anywhere via FTP, FTPS , or SFTP . We set up an FTP server for our repository in the DMZ. Once this bit was done, I needed an installation of MySQL Server and a method to programmatically pull the data from the DMZ, deposit it on a Windows share, unzip and insert the data. Below is a batch file used for this purpose. @ECHO On SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION @SET _LOGFILE="C:\Export\LOGS\OpenAirMysqlImports.txt" @SET _MYSQL="C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin\mysql.exe&quo