Craig’s Helpful Tips: Volume I (Wifi and Outlook)

Occasionally, I’m going to use this list to spread some helpful tips we’ve come across. These will also be posted to our blog at https://mcssys.wordpress.com. Today’s edition has two topics, specifically for Mac Users (so I’m copying the mac-users mailing list as well).

1: WiFi at Argonne

Some folks have been reporting connectivity issues on macs across the site. BIS networking worked with a number of affected people and came up with the following list of recommendations that seem to address the problem. We’ll be pushing these changes out to laptops that we manage, but if you self-manage you may want to apply these changes, especially if you’re having connectivity issues.

1) Make sure Argonne-auth is the top network in your list of preferred networks. In Systems Preferences, Network, on your Wifi adapter, click “Advanced”, then drag “Argonne-auth” to the top of the list.
2) While you’re in there, delete “Argonne-guest” and “eduroam” unless you have a real reason for them to be there. You probably don’t need Argonne-guest, but eduroam comes in handy when traveling.
3) Pop over to the TCP/IP tab in that window, and change “Configure IPv6” to “Link-local only”.
4) The first time you connect to Argonne-auth, you may get a popup to accept a certificate. It’ll look like this: https://anl.box.com/v/ANLWifiCertpic. You should accept the certificate – you’ll note the entire certificate chain is valid, so it’s safe to accept it. The certificate may be “ISE-541.it.anl.gov”, that’s fine as well.
5) Don’t put “@anl.gov”, or “ANL\” or anything else in for the login name on the login prompt. Just your ANL username, that’s it.

2: Pesky address completion in Outlook

This has become a much bigger issue since the mailing list changes that rewrite from “From” on mailing lists to show the sender’s name in front of the address of the list. Outlook’s decided to be very helpful and cache that address. I bet you’re seeing it right now – this mail looks like it’s coming from “Craig Stacey via tech-discuss”, which leads to two problems:

1) If you start addressing an e-mail to me, one of the autocomplete options is going to look like it’s going to “Craig Stacey”, but it’s really going to “Craig Stacey via tech-discuss”, which means, yup, you’re sending to the mailing list.
2) If you start typing “tech-discuss” in the To: line, it’s going to suggest “Craig Stacey via tech-discuss” as an autocomplete option. Not horrible, it will still go where you intend, but have the goofy and annoying address making me look like a megalomaniac who wants all mail to bear his name.

This also frequently occurs with “listname-owner” and “listname-bounces” addresses. So people end up sending to the owner of the list, or to the administrative address designed to catch mail bounces. Example here: https://anl.box.com/v/OutlookAutocomplete

There is no official way to turn this behavior off. I have a kludge that does it, however. In doing this, you erase previously saved addresses and prevent Outlook from saving new ones. It will only offer items found in your address book or other directories you’re connected with.

Quit Outlook, open a terminal, and type the following commands:

rm -r ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook\ 15\ Profiles/Main\ Profile/Data/Recent\ Addresses/*
chmod 500 ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook\ 15\ Profiles/Main\ Profile/Data/Recent\ Addresses/

You can download a shell script to do this here:

https://anl.app.box.com/v/FixOutlookMac
(direct download link here: https://anl.box.com/shared/static/37c15hblxwvv63q2acrojo9lnpopn8fr.sh)

This removes the cache of previously saved addresses and makes the directory read-only, preventing Office from writing new entries.

It’s ugly, but there’s not a real elegant solution to this. Since there’s no global option to turn off this behavior in outlook, you can only delete individual addresses from the suggestion list (just click the little x on the right), but that’s hardly scalable. You can add addresses to your contacts, and they will show up as options, but the other suggestions will still show up before them.

This behavior is not present in the web version of Outlook, and not in Apple Mail.

If you don’t want to do this, the best advice we can offer at this point is to keep an eye on the address in the To field when sending. If it’s got “via” in it, it’s probably not what you want. Also, Outlook is oddly insistent on using the autocomplete. You can go ahead and type the entire address as you want it, but once you hit enter it’s going to select that first autocomplete if it matches. The only way to stop it is to remove the suggestion or end the address with a semicolon before hitting enter.

And that’s it for this edition. Hope you find this helpful, and I promise to keep these below spammy noise levels.

Thanks!