Remove “Please excuse my brevity” from K9 Android app signature

There are many email apps for Android but my current weapon of choice is ‘K9 mail’. For the uninitiated K9 is an email management app that lets you manage several email accounts and provides the normal notification options you would expect.

Like most email applications it has a ‘helpful’ default signature that it applies to every email you send out i.e “Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.”

Some people may like this but when I discovered it, I wanted to either customise it or remove the message entirely. So here is how it’s done.

Customise or remove the default K9 email signature

1. Open the K9 mail application on your Android device.
2. Choose the relevant account and go to Settings >Account Settings > Sending mail > Composition defaults.
3. You will see ”Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.” in the “Signature” box.
4. Untick the signature box to remove all the text or edit the signature with your own text.

How do you allow/unblock a website that is protected by Sonicwall NSA Firewall content filter

This is one of the first tasks you will be asked to perform once you have put content filtering in place. As this is a straight question I will give a very short and concise answer. See below :

1. Go to your Sonicwall login page
2. Login using your admin username and password
3. Go to Security Services>Content Filter
4. Under ‘Content Filter type’ choose ‘Configure’
5. Go to ‘Custom List’ tab
6. Under Allowed Domains> Click add
7. Add your URL >Click OK>Click OK
You will now see it in the ‘Allowed Domains’ list.

On the client machine close all browser windows, re-open, and go to the previously blocked website. It should now appear.

Website appears in plain text without images after Sonicwall NSA firewall content filter has been allowed

The company I am doing work for have recently adopted Twitter.com as part of their marketing strategy and as a result the CEO needed access to the site.

It had previously been blocked by default but it now need to be added to the custom list within the Sonicwall content filter.

This did unblock the site but it was only showing the text of the site and not the text and images.

Can you guess what the problem is yet ?. Twitter.com uses another website to provide the images to it’s site i.e. twimg.com which is also blocked by default. Therefore, in order to resolve this problem you will need to also add ‘twimg.com’ to the filter aswell.

Although, this works for Twitter it is true of all sites that show as plain text. In order to find the site that contains the images just keep refreshing the page and make a note of the URLs that ‘try’ to load in the bottom left of the browser.

Symantec Endpoint protection won’t update client across DMZ

I recently had a situation in my network where I wanted to protect a new server with Symantec Endpoint Protection but the client machine was in a different DMZ (Demilitarized zone).

For example, the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager is on my internal LAN and the web server I wanted to protect is in my public DMZ.
I was able to deploy the client software to the web server but it was then unable to contact the management server for policy updates. This was verified by going to :
1.Symantec Icon in the system tray>Right click>Open Symantec Endpoint Protection
2. Help and Support>Troubleshooting>Management Tab
Under general information you will see ‘Server : Offline’ instead of a valid machine name or IP address.
So from this we can see that the client software cannot communicate with the management software.
Solution
Symantec uses ‘TCP 8014’ for this communication and this will need to be opened on your firewall between your Public DMZ and your internal LAN.
Once this rule has been added to your firewall you can go back to step 2 above, click on ‘Update’ under ‘Policy profile’ and you will see that ‘Server :’ will now have a machine name or IP address next to it.
After 5-10 mins your client software will be updated.

Validate numeric form fields in VBA

To help users enter the correct information every time they use a VBA form we can apply some validation checks.

In today’s example I have a field called ‘productID.text’ that will always be a number. To ensure that no other types of characters are input, you can use the following code.
Private Sub productID_Change()

If IsNumeric(productID.Text) = False Then
MsgBox "The product ID must be a number"
productID.Text = ""
End If
End Sub
The code is applied to the change event of the field and makes sure it only receives numbers. If an illegal character is entered it pops up a message asking for the correct input and then clears the field ready for the next attempt.

Perform validation on blank fields in a VBA form

When a user is inputting information it will be necessary to build in some quality checks to prevent the user from entering inaccurate or poorly formatted information.

One type of validation check that should be carried out involves checking to see if any important/mandatory fields have been left blank. The code below will check this and prompt the user if the information has not been provided.
If productID.Text = "" Then MsgBox ("Please enter the product ID")
If productID.Text = "" Then Exit Sub
This code pops up a message to the user to enter the product ID and when they click ‘OK’ the second line ensures the field is blank ready for user input.
This code should be added to your ‘Submit’ button.

Open a ‘Save As’ file dialogue box for Word using VBA

It may be necessary to complete an action in Word or Excel and then automatically pop up a ‘Save As’ dialogue .

In my case not only did I need to pop up a Save window but I also needed to give it a pre-determined name. Once the user had entered some details and submitted the information for the VBA code to act on, I didn’t want them to alter the document any further. In addition, I also wanted to standardise the word document and cut down on the work the user had to do.

Here is the code that will produce a Save window with the pre-populated name of ‘MyFileName’.

Dim fNameText As String
fNameText = “MyFileName”
With Dialogs(wdDialogFileSaveAs)
.Name = fNameText
.Show
End With

In the above example I have declared a variable, assigned it some text and then used the variable to populate the filename in the Save As dialogue.

Therefore, when the user saves the document it will be called “MyFileName.doc”.

NB. You could also just add the filename directly without a variable :

With Dialogs(wdDialogFileSaveAs)
.Name = “MyFileName”
.Show
End With