There are various methods of implementing URL filtering in an organisation, my preferred approach is to silently route traffic through a proxy server. This has a few distinct advantages:

• No end user configuration is required (via wpad.dat or Group Policy etc);
• If something breaks, it’s extremely simple to remove;
• Most people wouldn’t even know it was in place;

There are some downsides to this approach however:

• HTTPS traffic cannot be silently routed through the proxy server;
• NTLM authentication cannot be used

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Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself more and more frequently on the phone to Dell. They’ve recently introduced a system where you can key in the Express Service Tag of the system you’re calling about.

Most of the records we keep are of the service tag, not the express service tag. Keen to quickly convert a service tag, I put together a Windows Gadget to do the conversion from my desktop.

Click here to download and install the gadget. I’ve only tested it on Windows 7 x64, but it should work on Vista too.

Technically speaking, the Express service tag is a Base 10 (Decimal) number. The service tag is just a Base36 representation of that number.

Having decommissioned a few legacy AD DS domains over the last year or so we’ve had a few references in TFS to missing accounts. When attempting to delete the workspace you get the following error:

TF50605: There was an error looking up the SID for OLD-DOMAIN\CCNETNIGHTLYBUILD.

In order to delete the workspace, we need to remap it to a valid user account. Here’s the process to do just that.
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