LinuxMint & Firefox: Remove DuckDuckGo

Since LinuxMint 12, DuckDuckGo has been the search engine of choice of the distro.  Removing it as the search tools for the Firefox URL location bar can be a bit tricky since this option is not under the Firefox Edit > Preference.

Instead you have to:

1. Type "about:config" in the Firefox URL bar.
2. Click the button, [ I'll be careful, I promise! ]
3. Search for "keyword.URL", should only return 1 result.
4. Right-click the row and select modify.
5. Change the value to "http://www.google.com/search?q=" to use Google as your URL search bar.

SugarCRM Archiving Workflow Emails

SugarCRM does not have an automatic way of archiving any email that is generates as part of a workflow.  If the email is being send to a Lead or Client/Contact, you probably want to have this email stored as part of the email history for that entity.

Once trick around this oversight is as follows:

• Enable the SugarCRM archiving email service and address. i.e. your-instance-email@sugarondemand.com
• Configure one of your utility or role accounts (i.e. RoleX) to have a user email address of your-instance-email@sugarondemand.com.
• In the workflow, you can specific to always BCC email RoleX on the desired workflow lead/client/contact email. 

VPN using two-tier authentication: Radius & Active Directory (AD)

Using two-tiers of user authentication to permit VPN access to your corporate network is a best practice.  This ensures that even if a user's commonly used login (Active Directory) password is compromised, (can happen even with complex and aged passwords), that a different initial connection password is required to establish VPN connectivity.

I have used MS ISA Server along with FreeRadius.net to implement this design and best-practice security requirement.

However, one problem we had was the connecting PC when VPN'ed in, would get confused as to which set of credentials to use when accessing Windows Network resources, such as lettered drives.  As such, the user would be incorrectly denied access to normally available Windows Network resources.  The Windows Credential Manager needs to be informed NOT us use the RAS credentials for anything other that the RAS connection.

This can be set as follows: (Win7)

• Open the following file with notepad:  %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk\rasphone.pbk 
• Set: UseRasCredentials=0 instead of 1