Outlook Archive Button

What do you do if your Outlook Archive button is stuck sending messages to your old custom folder and your mobile is sending messages to the "Archive" folder and there's no option anymore in your Outlook to change this?

You change your Language.

I did this in Outlook Web Access and the one thing it will have to do is rename your "Archive" folder (archive-old or whatever) before changing the language settings.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-time-zone-and-language-settings-in-outlook-on-the-web-65239869-12e7-4a9d-bca1-76b0ad7ce273

That's a pretty well buried solution, even by Microsoft standards, and frankly I doubt anyone will ever see this post because if you search Online for "Outlook Archive change folder" or whatever, you'll get plenty of hits for the old Outlook so not really an easy way to look up this solution. But maybe, just maybe, this post will find a way to someone

Outlook has this "Archive" button - it's in Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Outlook mobile app, and it only does one thing - it puts the selected email message(s) into a folder called "Archive". It's a very quick way to file email because you also have short-cuts for it - the Backspace key in Outlook or a swipe gesture on mobile.

But what it used to do was used in an earlier version was ever so slightly different in that you could pick a folder for it - a folder with any name. After my Outlook was upgraded, it was still working and sending email to my custom named "All Mail" folder but my mobile started sending messages to the "Archive" folder, and Microsoft removed the option to pick what folder you used from Outlook. I haven't been able to figure this out for a long time which is why I'm posting this at all...

...

So yeah, that's the fix. Change your Outlook from English to French which renames all the stock system folders, Inbox, Sent, etc... and the Archive folder. Then move all your messages from "archive-old" or whatever you used and move them into Archive.

Ciao!

Python Logging

For those of us that start a program with "print" statements to get our bearings, the Python logging library is a drop-in replacement. After creating the logger, you can replace "print" statements with logger.debug('same text as before') or use suitable levels from debug, info, warning, error, and critical. You quickly get logging that can be configured to different levels you can use from debugging during development and clear output for the program running. There's also a built-in handler on logging exceptions to cleanly log exception info during exception handling. The library and cookbook are both clear and illustrative so check these links out:

Python 3 Library - Logging

Python 3 Logging Cookbook

I mentioned shell logging last time here:

I'm a Logger and I'm Okay

The other tool I use all the time in Python is the "assert" call which raises an error with message given. For example to sanity check the resulting size of a blob is matching your file size:

# sanity check the resultant blob is the same size as what's in the database

assert (os.path.getsize(outpath) == len(imgblob)), "File size %d does not match blob size %d for image %d in %s saved to %s" % (os.path.getsize(outpath), len(imgblob), imgid, args.table, args.archivepath)

There's every opportunity to properly handle program output and errors.

Ciao

I'm a [logger] and I'm OK!

The "logger" command can send a text string to the syslog. #why-didn't-I-know-that-already

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/logger.1.html

localadmin@mypc:~$ logger Mark

localadmin@mypc:~$ sudo tail /var/log/syslog
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Listening on GnuPG cryptographic agent and passphrase cache (restricted).
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Reached target Timers.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Listening on GnuPG network certificate management daemon.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Listening on D-Bus User Message Bus Socket.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Reached target Sockets.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Reached target Basic System.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Reached target Default.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[16714]: Startup finished in 44ms.
Oct 31 15:23:40 mypc systemd[1]: Started User Manager for UID 1000.
Oct 31 15:23:46 mypc localadmin: Mark 

In other news I updated my page on useful PC tools

• https://archangel.thenibble.org/p/essential-plugins.html  

Ciao

Working with DNS settings in systemd-resolved in Ubuntu

In troubleshooting some DNS name resolution issues I started to get more familiar with systemd-resolved in Ubuntu. Specifically if you look at the traditional /etc/resolv.conf file it says something like this:

# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)

#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN

# 127.0.0.53 is the systemd-resolved stub resolver.

# run "systemd-resolve --status" to see details about the actual nameservers.

nameserver 127.0.0.53

Hah hah! Subtly clever for any old hands in networking because "53" is the standard DNS port so 127.0.0.53 is a little clue to look for something specific.

Go ahead though - run "systemd-resolve --status", it doesn't require root, and it shows you a lot of info (the IPs of name servers have been change to protect the innocent...)

localadmin@ca-yvr-adm2:~$ systemd-resolve --status

Global

         DNS Servers: 10.1.1.11

                      10.2.2.12

          DNS Domain: sub.example.com

          DNSSEC NTA: 10.in-addr.arpa

                      16.172.in-addr.arpa

                      168.192.in-addr.arpa

                      <snip>

                      local

Link 1 (eno1)

      Current Scopes: none

       LLMNR setting: yes

MulticastDNS setting: no

      DNSSEC setting: no

    DNSSEC supported: no

The config file is easily found in "/etc/systemd/resolved.conf" and it's quite short and simple and it should look familiar if you have used other systemd configurations before. The configuration out-of-the-box will be blank with all options commented out. I wanted to add additional search domains to the Domains line, in the same space-delimited way you would traditionally do the search line in your resolve.conf.

[Resolve]

#DNS=

#FallbackDNS=

Domains=sub.example.com example.com example.local

#LLMNR=no

#MulticastDNS=no

#DNSSEC=no

#Cache=yes

#DNSStubListener=yes

Restart the same as you would any other systemd tool, and then re-check your resolved status

sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service 

systemd-resolve --status

OR check your /etc/resolve.conf file because if your only change is to modify the search domains, it also appears there for the resolver to work normally.

Global

         DNS Servers: 10.1.1.11

                      10.2.2.12

          DNS Domain: sub.example.com example.com example.local

          DNSSEC NTA: 10.in-addr.arpa

                      16.172.in-addr.arpa

                      168.192.in-addr.arpa

                      <snip>

                      local

Normally you would be done... Here's a couple bonus tricks that may arise.

You can modify DNS settings by interface - furthermore this is handy for testing DNS changes and reverting before making the change in the config file. Check out systemd-resolve --help 

The multicast service may conflict with a .local domain. The symptom I had was that I could resolve a short name like "pc" but could not resolve an FQDN like "pc.example.local". If you are using .local and finding odd DNS resolution results, edit your nsswitch.conf  and move "dns" earlier than the mdns (keep it after "files" though to avoid breaking your hosts file).

I've tried to make this a quick and useful blurb on how to use systemd-resolved and get pointed in the right direction because the documentation available wasn't simple for simple cases - there is certainly a lot of tuning you can do with the resolver tools.

Ciao

Archiving Files (E.g. Deleting Stuff) is My Super Power!

This week one of the things I was working on was archiving a lot of files on a file in order to prune it down ahead of migrating that share to a new location.

In particular this share while only ~100GB has > 3M files on it! Any basic operations like checking folder sizes, applying ACLs, etc are very slow on xM files. Looking at the share with WinDirStat I found that there's a large number of folders each with 20-50K files in each. Furthermore the majority of these files were old (years) and not actively used so we decided to Archive (e.g. Delete) the contents of these folders.

I started by using 7-Zip and there's an option on the Add to Archive screen to "Delete files after compression":

And that's pretty good! ... But not if you've got hundreds of folders to process.

Instead, with a bit of PowerShell, we invoke 7-Zip from a script and use the -sdel switch to remove files after they've been archived. This PS we used to simply to stuff each sub-folder into an archive.

Get-ChildItem . -Directory |  ForEach-Object  {

 $Archive = $_.Name + ".zip"

 $Folder = $_.Name + "\"

 &"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a $Archive $Folder -sdel

}

Pow!

Let's Encrypt on Blogger

I can't say I fiddle too much with the settings in Blogger, it's kinda "set it and forget it" stuff BUT sometime I think recently the team made it so you can enable SSL certs for custom domains on Blogger and it signs up a cert for you and everything.

https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/6284029?hl=en

In short it's so stupid simple just go do it and do it now

1. Go to basic settings 
2. Change HTTPS to Yes
3. Are we done yet? Why yes, yes we are.

Optionally once the cert has generated (it's not instant) you can also turn on redirect to SSL which again, why not? It's just the next tick box

This is how security should work; it works and its easy. I guess it could be on by default and pushed out but really, just click "security activate!"

Ciao

Automation with RT CLI

Ticket automation in Best Practical's RT is by far the easiest with the RT CLI.  I shan't re-hash the documentation but will give an example because it wasn't obvious just how easy it is. Like in Scouts, Be Prepared. A bit of prep makes the RT CLI simple to work with.

1. Setup your .rtrc and .bashrc as a one-off so you can invoke the RT CLI directly
2. Build a search query in the regular RT Web UI
3. Automate the function 

Find the "rt" binary:

[support-email@rt ~]$ locate */rt

/opt/rt4/bin/rt

Add it to your PATH in .bashrc:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/rt4/bin

 Setup your .rtrc file with your credentials rather than giving them on the command line:

[support-email@rt ~]$ cat .rtrc

server http://rt/

user me

passwd xxx

auth rt

Now you can already do some stuff like the examples from the RT CLI page in the wiki:

[support-email@rt ~]$ rt show user/ggee

id: user/832782

Password: ********

Name: GGee

EmailAddress: GGee@example.com

RealName: G Gee

Privileged: 1

Disabled: 0

CF-Employee Department: Applications Software

The last "prep" thing is to create your search criteria. This is far easier in the Web UI like you can build up your Search and then when you click Advanced you can copy that Query text directly and test it out from the CLI:

[support-email@rt ~]$ rt ls -i -q "'Corp Support'" "Status = 'stalled' AND Told < '-1 week'"

ticket/314370

ticket/315571

Now you're ready for some automation.

• The use of "-i" gives the output in a suitable format for processing
• The "-q" option specifies a queue and you need to use quotes (') around names with spaces in them, hence on the CLI you get "'Corp Support'"

The above query is Searching for Stalled tickets which haven't been touched (Told) in over a week. We want to change such tickets to Open so that staff pick up these tickets. For this we can setup a job with cron which pipes the tickets found in a search into an rt edit command.

# un-stalls support tickets NOTE: requires valid creds in .rtrc

@daily /opt/rt4/bin/rt ls -i -q "'Corp Support'" "Status = 'stalled' AND Told < '-1 week'"  | rt edit - set status=open

You can automate all kinds of functionality whether routine activities like this example, or to build helper scripts for large operations like to populate some new custom field or otherwise.