ASUS P5 series motherboard won't shutdown with Windows 7

I had to share this little gem of a trick with everyone. I've just built a new quad core system for my wife to play The Sims on. Works perfectly except for one tiny little hitch - When you shutdown the computer Windows shuts down fully but the PC doesn't turn off; the fans carry on spinning and the lights stay on.

Many thanks have to be given to user kirk620 on the Microsoft Answers site for finding the answer to this problem. Simply go into Device Manager and find the entry for your IEEE-1394 device and under Power Management tick the box to allow Windows to turn off the device. Hey presto! The computer shuts down properly again.

Apt-get from the command line behind a proxy

I'm putting this on here more as just a reminder for myself as much as anything else. I've recently started putting more effort into developing my Linux knowledge and I've been setting up an Ubuntu server without a GUI. One of the first problems I found was that I couldn't update apt-get. It turns out that apt-get doesn't automatically see the system proxy settings but can be fixed simply with one command:

export http_proxy="http://username:Password@foo.bar:8080"

Many thanks to Cybernerd on EduGeek for this spark of genius!

Unable to Telnet localhost

I was setting up a mailserver for a client and couldn't work out why I was continually unable to send messages to our SMTP relay. I had also set up a webmail client which was having similar problems sending email to the mailserver. I'd tried everything I could think of and everything that I found online. I'd even escalated the problem up to our ISP, with no joy.

So would you believe my surprise when I came across a TechNet thread that presented the solution to my problem; something so obscure I never would have thought of it.

It turns out that McAfee's 'Client Protection' component was blocking telnet from accessing the server by IP address and hostname. Once I'd disabled the client protection component I was able to telnet to the local server, the SMTP relay server and my webmail client was able to send emails to the mailserver.

I have to give many thanks to Rich Matheisen for his informed post on TechNet.