SuperTekBoy

Practical Help for Exchange & Office 365

Miscellaneous

131 funny, geeky and creepy questions to ask Alexa

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A couple of years ago we published a post titled 131 funny, geeky and creepy questions to ask Cortana. That post had a fantastic engagement. Despite the original 131 questions, the community discovered hundreds more. In fact, you are still finding new questions even today. Be sure to check out the comments on that article.

With that in mind, we thought it would be really cool to figure out what questions we could ask Alexa. We wondered if we could ask her some of the funny, geeky and, creepy questions we asked Cortana. But we also went looking for plenty of new questions.

We don’t want to show her responses. That’s for you to enjoy. Besides, who likes spoilers anyway?

Okay, in the name of science, just one spoiler. Plus, it’s a great excuse to quote some Monty Python.

“Alexa, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

Funny, geeky and, creepy questions to ask Alexa

Tip: Be sure to ask Alexa, “Give me the Five-Nine”. This command actually starts an interactive skill with Alexa and is reminiscent of the old choose your own adventure novels. The Alexa adventure is set in the world of one of my favorite TV shows, Mr. Robot. If you haven’t seen that show I highly recommend it. It takes about 5-10 minutes to complete. It’s a lot of fun.

Let’s smash the 400 questions you found for Cortana! Let us know if we missed any good ones in the comments below.

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Symantec Endpoint Protection Pending System Changes Reboot

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Ever run into this error? You may see it when attempting to install or upgrade the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager. I ran across it recently when upgrading to SEPM 12.1.5, but I’ve seen it on previous versions as well.

Symantec EndPoint Protection Pending System Changes Reboot

Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager has detected that there are pending system changes that require a reboot. Please reboot the system and rerun the installation.

This may seem like an easy fix. Just reboot the server right? But oddly it never works. Regardless of how many times you reboot this message will always crop up.

When the installer runs it checks for a key in the registry. It’s this key that can cause this error. Thankfully this is an easy fix. For this, we need to modify the registry.

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Symantec announces Backup Exec 15

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Symantec Backup Exec 15

Symantec has announced Backup Exec 15. This product will go into beta in the first quarter of 2015. Although no date has been specified.

One of the biggest changes is that Symantec has dropped 32-bit support for its Media Server. This means that your media server can only run on a 64-bit operating system.

This won’t be a big shock for the Microsoft Exchange community. Exchange Server has required a 64-bit media server for some time.

Whether Symantec will support a media server on Windows 2003 is left to be seen. My guess, sometime between the beta and general release, Symantec will make 2008 a minimum requirement. Especially with Server 2003 going end-of-life in less than 8 months.

The other big news—Cumulative Update 6—this version will officially add support for the latest release of Exchange 2013. Although by the time this goes beta, I expect CU7 to be released.

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Symantec ditches Backup Exec 2012 Release 2

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Symantec Backup Exec 2012 was received with mixed reviews when it launched.

Many complained about the new GUI. Others did not like the new server-centric mindset that had replaced the traditional job-centric method. The list was extensive.

The good news was that Symantec listened very closely to their user base. And kudos to Symantec for doing this! They realized they had made a mistake and promised to bring back everything users had loved about previous versions.

They dubbed this project Backup Exec 2012 Release 2.

Release 2 would also include added support for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013, such as allowing granular restores. At present, only full database restores can be performed on these two products. It would also add support for Server 2012 as a Media Server.

Release 2 went into beta late last year. It had a proposed release date of June 2014.

‘So, what’s all this ditching Release 2?’ you may ask.

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Cisco VPN connects but cannot access inside resources

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I ran into an issue recently where I was configuring a new Remote Access VPN. The Cisco VPN client would connect successfully. However, I could not access any resources on the LAN behind the firewall.

The termination point was an older PIX 515 running IOS 8.0. I was using the latest version of the Cisco VPN Client software, which was running on Windows 8.1.

In my particular case I had the following line in my config:

NO CRYPTO ISAKMP NAT-TRAVERSAL

This line was singlehandedly preventing me from accessing internal LAN resources. To fix this, I entered the following commands:

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Cisco VPN – Reason 433: Reason Not Specified by Peer

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Secure VPN Connection terminated by Peer.
Reason 433: Reason Not Specified by Peer

I ran into this error recently when trying to set up a Remote Access VPN. This error could be caused by multiple problems. However, in my particular case, it was the settings under AAA authentication servers. Upon connection, the VPN client would prompt for logon credentials and then immediately return this error.

In my environment, I was using a Windows Server 2003 Domain Controller for LDAP authentication. The VPN termination point was an older PIX 515 firewall running IOS 8.0. I was also using the latest Cisco VPN client on Windows 8.1.

After some quick troubleshooting, it appeared that the domain account used to query LDAP was either buried too deep in the OU structure or, some of the OU names were causing problems (they had spaces and special characters).

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Why can’t I access my Cisco firewall through a web browser? (Part III)

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PREVIOUS: Why can’t I access my Cisco firewall through a web browser? (Part II)

In part 2 of our series, we explored whether or not the ASDM image was linked in the firewall’s configuration. And if not, how to create that link. We also checked whether the image even existed on flash with the SHOW DISK0: command. Part 3 explores the possibility that the image file is missing and what is required to remedy this situation.

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Why can’t I access my Cisco firewall through a web browser? (Part II)

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PREVIOUS: Why can’t I access my Cisco firewall through a web browser? (Part I)

In part one of this series, we explored possible configuration errors that could prevent you from connecting to your Cisco Firewall via a web browser. This involved checking the HTTP commands from the Cisco CLI. In the second part of this series, we will look at other possibilities that could be preventing you from making this connection.

Two other possibilities are that the ASDM image is either not referenced in the firewall configuration, or, the ASDM image is missing entirely. To check on the first possibility execute the following command from the Cisco CLI.

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