Thunderbird - Email Hangs on Sending - SSL Settings

 

Intro:

Upon initial setup of inputting your email address and password, Thunderbird grabs the server settings for incoming and outgoing mail.

Everything looked right at first and emails starting rolling in. However outbound emails just hang. Upon closer inspection the outbound port is correct however the "Connection Security" states "SSL/TLS" and not "STARTTLS" as my mail server requires.

So I'm not sure if it's pulling "SSL/TLS" from my mail server or it's the way Thunderbird is interpreting it.

Note: These settings are for my mail server, yours may be different. Check with your provider.

Thunderbird version is v102.2.0 (64 bit).

Fix:

Hamburger Icon 👉 Account Settings 👉 Outgoing Server (SMTP) 👉 Edit.

• Verify port is 587.
• Change "Connection Security" from "SSL/TLS" to "STARTTLS".

Test email sending again.

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7zip - Best Compression Settings

 

Intro:

Be sure to grab the latest version of 7zip here before proceeding. I've tested multiple settings and I've determined the below settings are the best, compression wise.

These settings will require large amounts of ram. I've tested this with 64gb and 144gb of system memory.

The settings below are a screenshot from v22.01 (2022-07-15).

Settings:

Copy the settings as seen in the photo below for the best compression ratio.

Conclusion:

The above settings will compress a 930mb file down to 175mb. The files tested were a Windows installer, text files, and PNG images.

A solid block size is what's lowering the overall file size. You can read more about it here.

Keep in mind the compression will be horrible if uncompressed audio or video files are selected.

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VMware Workstation - Windows 10 Restore to VM Fails - Incorrect Guest OS

 

Intro:

When I back up a customer's system I use Backup and Restore (Windows 7) that's built into Windows 10 to make a vhdx copy of the current partition layout. This affords me the ability to back up a single file to either a network share or an external hard drive in little time. The server versions of Windows allow you to use the same application however you can store more than one backup at a time. That's to say the Pro versions of Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 will only allow you to store one image at a time. Tomorrow it'll overwrite the previous backup, etc.

I can then keep an untouched full backup of the customers system for 30 days or so.

In this weird instance the physical machine here is an Acer Veriton. What makes this interesting is that UEFI was enabled and secure boot was disabled on this system when I got my hands on it. I'm guessing at one point or another it did have secure boot enabled from the factory (possibly a Windows 8 machine upgraded to 10?) and someone disabled it. It's running Windows 10 Pro 21H2.

Usually what I'll do with a customer machine is run Windows Backup and Restore (Windows 7) and tell it to just image the C:\ drive. The option is called "Include a system image of drives". Once the backup completes you're left with a vhdx image of the C:\ drive that you can easily restore if a hard drive fails, etc. The only caveat here is that if the drive was a 512gb drive then you can only restore to a 512gb or larger drive.

Now a restore should be straightforward and uneventful. In the case of virtualizing a machine you would create a new VM, choose Windows 10 x64, create a new HDD and either match the HDD size to the original or make it larger, and boot to the Windows ISO. Go through the Windows restore process as detailed in this post and reboot. That should be the end of it to virtualize or restore a machine.

Problem:

Circle back to the UEFI setting. When creating a new VMware machine you have the ability to choose the firmware type. The options are:

• BIOS
• UEFI with or without Secure Boot

Normally you'd choose UEFI without Secure Boot and go. With this particular Acer I came across the following issue when doing the restore:

I double checked that the guest OS was Windows 10 x64 using UEFI with Secure Boot disabled and for the life of me I kept getting the above error right before the restore starts.

• I tried UEFI with Secure Boot enabled. No change.
• I tried BIOS, no change.

Solution:

As a last ditch effort I changed the VMware's Guest OS properties to "Windows 7 x64" and selected "UEFI with Secure Boot off". No clue what the difference is in VMware but I was able to restore the vhdx to this VM without an issue and did not receive the above error.

Also I should include that this is VMware Workstation 16.2.4 build-20089737. There's other bullshit issues with this application that have yet to be fixed. I'll save that for another post.

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