Category: General IT Info

Web Help Desk – How to Reset The Password For the Admin User Account and Also Activate It

The first user account created in Web Help Desk is also the only user account that will remain active and useable if all of your technician licenses expire. So if you disabled the default admin user account in Web Help Desk when you purchased additional licenses and then you find yourself in the situation of your licenses expired you will be locked out of Web Help Desk since there are no active user accounts which can be used to log into it. If you are in this situation you will need to directly edit the Web Help Desk backend database to reset the default admin user account password and re-activate it. Here is the MySQL query for doing this. Execute it against your Web Help Desk database. You may need to adapt the query for your particular database backend server.

UPDATE TECH SET USER_NAME='admin', PASSWORD='password', use_ldap_authentication=0, INACTIVE=0, INCORRECT_AUTH_ATTEMPTS=0 where CLIENT_ID=1;

The above SQL query will set the username of the default user account in Web Help Desk to “admin”. The password will be set to “password”. At this point you should be able to log into Web Help Desk using those credentials. Of course you should immediately change the user account password to something more secure.

Outlook 2016 Error – A required action was not successful because of an unspecified error

When trying to digitally sign an email message in Outlook 2016 for Windows running in Windows 10 you may get this error:

Error - A required action was not successful because of an unspecified error
“A required action was not successful because of an unspecified error”

Encrypting emails works fine, it is only when you try to JUST sign an email you get this error. This error appears to only occur with Outlook x64 (64-bit). When you search the internet on the error “A required action was not successful because of an unspecified error” in relation to Outlook for Windows the most common solution you come across is to run the command “sfc /scannow” in an elevated command prompt. This didn’t work for me when I tried it on Windows 10 Enterprise (Current Branch) with Outlook 2016 for Windows. The solution that worked for me was in this forum post. The solution in that post was to enable the email security option “Request S/MIME receipt for all S/MIME signed messages”. Once I did that I was able to sign emails successfully without getting any errors. Sending emails to non-exchange email users with this option enabled doesn’t appear to have any adverse effects.

How to Clear the Password History in Linux

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) the password history is stored in the file /etc/security/opasswd. You can only edit this file while logged in as the root user. You can either selectively delete old passwords from the file or you can clear everything out of the file with the command:

echo “” > /etc/security/opasswd

How to Configure Splunk to use a Web Proxy Server

A Splunk server I installed was configured such that it could only communicate with hosts within the corporate network so it did not have direct internet access. This posed a problem when trying to use the “Browse Splunkbase” option in the Splunk administrator web interface. I also could not use the “iplocation” data-processing command.

This was the suggestion I got from Splunk Support which didn’t work for me for some reason. I am including it here for reference for someone where this solution may work for them:

You can set the environment variable HTTP_PROXY in the session shell.
You can set it in your /etc/bashrc or /etc/profile.

# Proxy Settings
http_proxy=http://proxy.domain.com:8080
https_proxy=https://proxy.domain.com:8080

I also found something in the forums:
http://www.splunk.com/support/forum:SplunkGeneral/2531

The Splunk install I was running was version 3.4.9 which was on a CentOS 5 server. The Splunk installation was configured to autostart on boot. I ended up getting this to work by editing the /etc/init.d/splunk startup script file by adding the following to it:

# Proxy settings
HTTP_PROXY="http://proxy.domain.com:8080"
export HTTP_PROXY

Change “proxy.domain.com:8080” to be the proxy server address and port for the proxy server that you want to use. So with the above lines added to my /etc/init.d/splunk file, the top portion of the file looked like this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# /etc/init.d/splunk
# init script for Splunk.
# generated by 'splunk enable boot-start'.
#
# chkconfig: 2345 90 60
# description: Splunk indexer service
#
SPLUNK_HOME="/opt/splunk"
RETVAL=0
# Proxy settings
HTTP_PROXY="http://proxy.domain.com:8080"
export HTTP_PROXY

I put the setting into effect by restarting my Splunk service with the command: /sbin/service splunk restart

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