BiggAndyy the Magazine

Here is a little tip for the Staff, Students, and Faculty here at Pitt. There are special deals available to anyone with a Pitt ID at local retailers, national chains, and online. The Human Resources website has information and coupons for places like Dell, Howard Hanna, The Men’s Warehouse, and others. The offers change so bookmark the hr link and check back often.

And students, you can add to your online arsenal of living on-the-cheap tools by looking for sites like craigslist, gunbroker, and especially for the online coupons. The bigger the site the bigger the deals and more selection. But Ebates is a great alternative to things like amazon and ebay since you don’t need to pay a fee to get the deal.

I was sold when I saw my favorite outdoors places like Dunham’s and Outdoor Superstore at ebates. I have always found my hard to find reloading supplies at those places (try to find reloading dies for .38 S&W at Wally’s or Gander). And now for an additional 5% off just for clicking, done deal for me.

The hard print media is going by the wayside and places like Ebates and others are where even the brick-and-mortar retailers are taking their advertising and sale dollars to generate traffic to their stores. Bad for newspapers, great for us.

Here is the scenario, you have an old NT Domain chugging along side your bright shiny new AD Domain. You are bringing people into the new AD domain via a complete re-image of their client Windows XP computer. BUT, some folk have too much junk built up on their local hard drives and too many oddly configured maverick programs running that it just plain makes like easier to join them to the AD domain rather than spend the hours moving their files to AFS and then back again to the local hard drive.

So you join the computer to the new domain and with roaming profiles active. Everything seems to be working ok, you just have to move some desktop icons onto the new domain user account (c:\documents and settings\racerx.NT\desktop\ to c:\documents and settings\racerx.AD\desktop). No problem, they move fine.

But when the user logs into the AD domain and clicks on a program sometimes you get this wonderful message:

This is a shortcut generated by windows itself! It points to a place
on the local hard drive and it never had this warning before.

Well, what is happening is that some of the icons on the desktop and in the Start Menu are stored on the AD profile server. So the client is reaching out to the AD to get the icon from the server and windows is asking for permission to run this icon from the remote location even though it is pointing to a locally stored program.

There is an easy way to make this extra step of telling windows it is ok to execute these files. you can set up a “trust” between your local machine and the profile server. You do it by adding your AD domain to the Local Intranet settings of Internet Explorer.

Right Click on Internet Explorer on your desktop and
select Properties. From there click on the Security Tab.
Click on the Local Intranet Icon and click the Sites Button.

Next Click on the Advanced Button

Then enter your AD domain to the zone and click on ADD.

Simple as that. Click on OK for the rest of the entries to close all the dialog boxes opened and right away the annoying “Are you sure” window will not appear again.