I remember when I was a kid I’d look up and see stars in the sky. Then over the years they slowly disappeared. Now we’ve made our own stars to see in the sky. Thank you Starlink.
Disable Reply All to Company Emails
To configure
In Outlook enable the Developer option on the ribbon under File > Options > Customize Ribbon. Check Developer in the right column.
From the Developer tab select Design a Form
Pick message and open.
Select the Actions tab, then select the line with Reply to All and click Properties.
Uncheck the Enabled box in the top right then select OK.
Select the Properties tab, then check the Send form definition with item box. Choose OK on the dialog box that appears.
If this gives an error click Properties again
Click Publish > Publish Form As…
Save it in your personal forms library as something easy to remember like NoReplyAll
Close the windows
To use
Click on Developer tab > Choose Form > Look in: Personal Forms Library > NoReplyAll > Open
Then send that message to AllCorp1 or as many people as you want and they will see…

Just another day
Woke up face down on my uncharged mobile phone.
Went to Lowes and bought some nice planks to put on top of a broken glass table I found.
Discovered one of my push button hood pins on the Dodge don’t work right, the fun way.
Bought bright green tie down straps for the Dodge.
Verbally assaulted another human because he was coughing and touching all the power tool models.
Reported him to the manager who took it very seriously.
Sanded said wood and finished the table.
Reloaded my burner laptop.
Organized my cable crates.
Had a Zoom call on burner laptop with yet another solar company.
Signed an agreement for a solar power system for the house.
Reloaded my burner laptop.
Ate pizza rolls.
Added gravel to where the gutter dumps water.
I want Olive Garden.
Bye old PL3X, hi new PL3X
I did something really really dumb last night….
I made my new Plex VM on my ESXi environment that I recently stood up on an R820 with 1tb of ram to move away from my old R910 with 256 gigs. Anyways, I got all the automated stuff working right at the system level so all I needed to do was export the config from the source server. I connected directly to the source server and loaded XFCE4 and Filezilla so I could have the lazy GUI for SSH transfer of the files between the two since there were some plugins I wasn’t going to bring over. Before I started the transfer I had to destroy the test config on the destination server which I started to do through Filezilla which is just telling Filezilla to delete everything in /var/lib/plexmediaserver and that started out fine. It was slow. When you delete through Filezilla it deletes everything item by item. Delete this file, ok it’s deleted, now delete that file, ok that is deleted X thousands of files. I stopped that process and decided to just use the terminal to delete. I opened it and ran rm -r /var/lib/plexmediaserver.
It completed in about 30 seconds.
It was the wrong server. It was the source server. So all those months of tuning and tweaking gone. Shit.
A few perks though. My actual library data is fine. My Plex is a fresh install. I got to turn off the R910 immediately because there was no going back. Now my server room is noticeably cooler because that massive system is off.
Ram transcoding for PLEX on Ubuntu
My PLEX host has RAM, it’s currently a Dell R910 with 256 gigs of ram. I don’t want to murder my twin 1tb SSD’s doing all that fancy transcoding so I have mine use 50 gigs of ram as a temporary folder. You can use much less but I on average with 3 streams going am using less than 20 gigs of ram for the system so I can spare the memory.
Here’s how to accomplish this on Ubuntu.
sudo mkdir /mnt/plexdisk
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,size=50G tmpfs /mnt/plexdisk
verify it’s mounted
df -h
before we make it a forever change, make a backup cause one mistake can be bad.
sudo cp -v /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup
make it mount on boot
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Add this to the bottom then CTL+X to exit and save
tmpfs /mnt/plexdisk tmpfs rw,size=50G 0 0
Reboot if you want.
Now to the PLEX interface.
Under server settings navigate to Transcoder
Set the Transcoder temporary directory to /mnt/plexdisk
either reboot or just restart the PLEX service
systemctl restart plexmediaserver.service or whatever you called it.
My dang 48 core host doesn’t support virtualization on VirtualBox
I learned the hard way that my Dell PowerEdge R910 with 48 cores and 256 gigs of ram doesn’t support VT-x… It runs Ubuntu Server 18.04 currently and I decided to put Virtual Box on it because that has the easiest work around to get virtualization going on an unsupported processor. Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS, I’m not an idiot.
To get those VMs going anyways I had to lie to the software using the following command and I used one of the following processors since you don’t need to tell it to be a Xeon for a basic Domain Controller or backup appliance. You may need to disable USB on the VM also.
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i5-3570”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-2635QM”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-3960X”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-5600U”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-6700K”
CRAP I FORGOT MY iDRAC LOGIN
Welp, I’m nowhere near my server which runs Debian and I want to iDRAC in to do things but I forgot the password or never set it but I’m cheap and buy used so I guess I’ll just reset it remotely…. Here’s how.
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y ipmitool
Now that that’s loaded. I specifically want to reset the password for a user with admin rights so I need a list of users.
ipmitool user list 2
in the dump look under Channel Priv Limit. Find your user with ADMINISTRATOR listed and not the ID number. If you’re just resetting root then odds are it’s ID 2.
ipmitool user set password 2 #####
Replace ##### with what you want your password to be. Password changes are instant, go back to the GUI and you can sign in.
Adding Google AdSense so I can do more YouTube things
I guess YouTube needs a site for your Google AdSense to be created. I for some reason at the time of posting have 1800+ subscribers on the YouTube so why not right?
Here’s my dumbest video lately.
But I want my mapped drives to the old server names to work
Making a new file server is great, everyone loves a brand new server with all the old cat videos Karen has pasted randomly throughout it(maybe enable data dedupe to save some space). This use case is for when you have an old file server that has been migrated to a new file server and you want the \\newservername\share to work but also want \\oldservername\share to work but it won’t unless there’s a server name alias.
Now the right way is to do something with group policy and update their mapped drives to your new server but there’s all that “I know more than IT does” and “I do what I want..WHY DOES IT BREAK EVERYTHING?” users so….
Verify the machine account no longer exists in AD, delete if you must as long as that system is no longer active. If it is then you’re just boned, this will not work.
From Admin CMD(ideally from that server):
NETDOM COMPUTERNAME [yournewserver] /add:[oldserver.windrammer.net]
Actually type COMPUTERNAME then the new server name.
Enable Free/Busy information between the Office 365 users from two different tenants, when the Autodiscover of one of them is pointing On-Premise
Use this when you and your friendly companies both on Office 365 want to share free/busy information for better meeting scheduling. PowerShell method at the bottom.
On the cool tenant
From the Office 365 admin center dashboard, go to Admin > Exchange.
Go to Organization > Sharing.
Under Organization Sharing, click New .
In New organization relationship, in the Relationship name box, type a friendly name for the organization relationship as “Cool Guys to Other Guys”
In the Domains to share with box, type the domain for the external Office 365 or Exchange on-premises organization as xcr.jp(if there are additional domains in the org they will automatically populate).
Select the Enable calendar free/busy information sharing check box to turn on calendar sharing with the domains. Set the sharing level for calendar free/busy information and set which users can share calendar free/busy information.
To set the free/busy access level, select one of the following:
-Calendar free/busy information with time only.
-Calendar free/busy with time, subject, and location.
Click save to create the organization relationship.
Once the setup is completed, Organization relationship should show up the following information auto populated into it.
Also make sure that all the federated domains are well populated into the Organization relationship.
On the Other Guys tenant:
From the Office 365 admin center dashboard, go to Admin > Exchange.
Go to organization > sharing.
Under Organization Sharing, click New .
In new organization relationship, in the Relationship name box, type a friendly name for the organization relationship as “Other Guys to Cool Guys”
In the Domains to share with box, type the domain for the external Office 365 or Exchange on-premises organization as windrammer.net(if there are additional domains in the org they will automatically populate)
Select the Enable calendar free/busy information sharing check box to turn on calendar sharing with the domains. Set the sharing level for calendar free/busy information and set which users can share calendar free/busy information.
To set the free/busy access level, select one of the following:
Calendar free/busy information with time only.
Calendar free/busy with time, subject, and location.
Click save to create the organization relationship.
Once the setup is completed, Organization relationship should show up the following information auto populated into it.
Also make sure that all the federated domains are well populated into the Organization relationship.
OR POWERSHELL!!!!
From the Cool Guys tenant
New-OrganizationRelationship -Name “Other Guys to Cool Guys” -DomainNames “xcr..jp” -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel LimitedDetails
From the Other Guys tenant
New-OrganizationRelationship -Name “Cool Guys to Other Guys” -DomainNames “windrammer.net” -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel LimitedDetails