Microsoft Outlook Newsletters & Dynamic Distribution Lists

Another IT nugget for the MS admins out there. Microsoft has recently introduced an Outlook “Newsletters” service, solely intended to create and distribution internal newsletter emails to an organization.

As always with Microsoft, things aren’t always as they seem, and our newsletter editors struggled to send the edition. The error given was something along the lines of “list contains external contacts”.

After pulling my hair for an hour trying to find where it thought an external contact was (list was all internal), I noticed that since this is a web-only feature and available exclusively via Outlook Web Access, I jumped over to OWA and looked up the list. Sure enough, somehow its classified as “external”, despite even having the external contacts allowed checkbox to be off.

Thinking this is likely a bug/glitch, I figured I’d try the first dumb thing that came to mind; nesting the dynamic list within a static list. I did so and told the user to wait about an hour, then try it out. Sure enough, after some time, the newsletter delivered.

So if you’re having weird messages trying to send Newsletters via the Outlook Newsletter service, see if you’re sending to a dynamic distribution list, and if you need the list to be dynamic, just nest it in a static list.

Taking your ham license test at the Franklin Institute

(Note that this is a historical article; there are no more VE sessions/ham tests at the Franklin Institute. If you’re in the Philadelphia area, please see this page for more information on VE testing: https://www.phil-mont.org/exams/)

Yesterday was “old timers” night at the Philmont Mobile Radio club meeting. Hams who have been licensed 25+ years were asked to talk about their experiences with the hobby from when they got started to present.

One thing that I always noticed is that partly due to the Philmont tie-in of the Franklin Institute Amateur Radio station to Philmont, took their test AT the Franklin Institute. Of those many if not most attributed the station display to be the motivating factor in getting their license.

I asked what the experience was like, and got the following answer:

You took the test in the cafeteria. They had 30-50 people all taking their test. The CW (morse code) portion was played out over a speaker, then if you passed that, you moved on to the written exam, which was much like the General test you take today. — Steve K3FZT

If you took your test, or were motivated to get licensed due to the Franklin Institute station, please comment below!

One Year In – New Features Unlocked

This Friday will mark 1 year since the worst day of my life (so far), the day I lost my big brother. He was also the third personal loss in frame of about a year, and while all 3 were certainly close to me, he was the closest.

New Features Unlocked One thing I didn’t quite expect was the emotional fallout; while what’s done is done and life goes on, I still get triggered by the smallest, most insignificant things; seeing something on the web or on TV and wanting to share it with my brother. Working on cleaning up the yard for a party that he used to be so anal about (and we hilariously fought over), and not hearing the “demands” and “you’re doing it wrongs” lol. Hearing a weird song I think he’d like, and hey let me just…oh…yeah. Going to hamfests are certainly lonelier.

I can confirm something I shared from a Redditor in a previous post I made; they mentioned that loss tends to act like waves: at first there’s a big splash, and then the emotions come in waves afterwards, with each wave getting a little less intense. I feel that was a great description, although unfortunately the waves do keep coming and perhaps will never end, but things are a little easier to deal with over time. Good memories certainly help, and lots of funny moments to chuckle about.

One other “feature unlocked” I think was a good thing: fire. While I feel like I’m still dealing with a certain level of depression or “something”, I find that now if I want to do something, I’m just doing it, no hemming, hawing, thinking about it, etc, just GET ER DONE. Life is short, nothing is guaranteed, so strike while the fire is hot.

My brother woke up one night apparently had dozed off watching music vids on Youtube, and found this German Rapper “Sido” that he INSISTED I watch. While the one below isn’t the version I wanted to embed, this song, “Der Himmel Soll Warten”, or “Heaven Can Wait” represents what I mean. The song talks about all the things he wants to do, and Heaven will just “have to wait”. (And no I can’t speak a lick of German)

I’m shouting it to the sky, heaven will have to wait
’cause I’ve still got plans, heaven shall wait
When it is all over, take away my breath
But now I stay here, heaven will have to wait

There’s still a lot going on both personally and naturally with the country and world being in such turmoil, at this point I’m just keeping my nose to the grindstone and dealing with whatever comes my way. Volunteering, mentoring, and trying to have a little fun along the way keeps me above water for now.

MISSING YOU JOHN.

System Uptime: 97 Years

As always, when I tag something here as IT, its usually something crazy, hard to find, or mind-blowing, or perhaps falls under the “I learned something new today” realm. This is one of those things: System Uptime.

As always, when it comes to Windows systems, its best to do a shutdown every night for general maintenance, updates, and system hygiene. That said, its not 1997 anymore so Windows is usually pretty reliable, and could likely run for days if not months without an actual reboot, but then you don’t get the usual monthly updates, and things may slow to a crawl if you’re running software memory leaks and such.

Anyways, so as part of pushing out some new software (a management agent), I noticed some computers not checking in despite nearly a week after the software was pushed out. I looked at my auditing agent and found that it was reporting uptime of nearly a month+ for some of the affected computers, so naturally since the group was relatively small, I just emailed everyone telling them to reboot if they haven’t recently (and adding that they should be shutting down nightly). Of course, I got a few replies where people were saying that they WERE in fact shutting down nightly.

So as someone who’s OK eating his own dog food, I checked my own computer in the auditor, and found that in showed my computer having 6 days of uptime despite the fact that I FOR SURE did a full shutdown yesterday and had to do a full startup this morning. Wow, the auditing software must be broken, so I sent in a ticket to the vendor to have them check it out.

After doing so though, I figured I’d look into this a little more, and found that in fact, my computer WAS reporting a 6 day uptime, which is likely what the auditing software was pulling from, so its not the software, but Windows, so, WHY?

That led me to this Reddit post, showing that despite the visible states Windows could be in as on, off, hibernating, and sleeping, there’s another “hidden” state if you have fast boot enabled, where its a pseudo hibernate mode (think hiber-sleep-inate). Great, more tricks!

That said, when shutting down a Windows computer with fast boot enabled, it actually puts the computer into that hiber-sleep-inate state, and not a full “off” state as one expects. The only way to get a true “cold boot” is to actually restart.

Link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/1emwqmh/why_isnt_my_event_logs_last_boot_date_time/

So yet again, I learn something new, and really, I’d love to know how people find out about this crazy stuff??

January 2025 – My How Time Flies

In coming in to post this, I saw some old drafts, one of which was from late 2023, talking about how my life was reduced to commuting between work and a hospital to visit my dad (he’s since recovered and back home!). In that draft I mentioned a quote by Winston Churchill:

If you’re going through hell, keep going!

I can certainly say that I think I was certainly there. Over the last 2 (nearly 3) years, I’ve experienced a major medical event myself, then lost now two family members and a good friend, all under the age of 60, and nearly lost my dad. I’m not out of the weeds yet, I certainly wouldn’t even blink if a meteor landed in the parking lot of the restaurant I’m at, but at the moment, I’m at the “keep going” part, for better or for worse.

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RIP Johnny (My Big Brother)

One of my last posts of 2023 – titled ‘3 Funerals and a Crappy Breakfast’ talked about the pitfalls of 2023, the people I lost that year, and just generally how “crappy” the year went (despite its upside). In that post, I looked forward to 2024 being new, different, and “better”. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.

I’ll post a “year to date” review of this year in a separate post, but for now, I’m sad to report that my brother John “Johnny” has passed away in July of 2024.

Nearly a week and a half since, I can at least talk again, but I’m still in shock and dealing with the mental fallout of all of this. I’ve been to many funerals in my life, but this was the first one where I’m one of the people greeting the visitors. It wasn’t easy, as they never are. I felt bad for people walking up, who just don’t know what to say, and often, they just admit that, and thats OK. There IS NO right thing to say.

My brother pushed me to be nerdy since I was old enough to know what that was. He often got me awesome Christmas gifts, including things like a CB, stereo speakers, a ham radio, and more, almost all from Radio Shack.

Over the last decade or two, we shared a common interest of going to hamfests, whether we we’re vendoring or just buying. Over the last few years he had a stroke in 2020, which impacted his right side. As such, I only really vendored at one hamfest since then, and his ability to get around at a hamfest involved solid ground and using a cane.

Hopefully I’ll put up a better post in the near future; seems I just haven’t had a chance to update this site like I hoped to, and really life has just been kicking me in the nuts over and over again. I have done some cool nerdy things this year, I have picked up some neat stuff, but I just can’t seem to catch up.

RIP Johnny…I MISS YOU BRO.

Windows Server and Corrupted Files

As always, I try to post up IT fixes that may be a little tougher to find, and only if the fix is proven to actually work, so you’re not scrolling amongst 100s of forum posts. One useful command from back in the day, “sfc /scannow” used to be used to fix corrupted files in Windows installations, although its been a bit of a meme over the past few years (decades?) in that it was almost universally suggested by online Microsoft support, yet rarely ever fixed anything. (Rarely being used liberally here – it DID work…sometimes). Yet, what happens when SFC doesn’t work, and instead spits out an error?

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Fiery Print Server ignores DHCP/DNS Changes with Papercut

Another (Wasted) day…another dollar. Its not unheard of for a typical IT person to rant about dealing with printers. It seems they’re constantly the bane of any admin; not printing, needing special treatment, buggy drivers, buggy settings, etc. I often think I’m immune to a majority of the issues; I’ve been through EVERYTHING, fixed it all, and hey if I can get 1960s teletype machines working, I can get a friggin modern printer working. Well today, I was put back in my place…

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