Tools Handy apps - Serva64 Serva64 is one of those little utilities that you might first look at and wonder just why it exists. For those of you who have never heard of it, Serva64 is a very
StarWind StarWind ProActive Support Technical support is one of those things that you hope to not need too often but when you do need it, you need something that you can count on, is there for you
HTTPS Why do I support HTTPS Everywhere? One of the things I'm passionately in support of is HTTPS everywhere. That is, every single website using HTTPS. It doesn't matter if it's a simple text site or if it's a full
Veeam Exploring Veeam's Windows Agent Years ago I worked at Symbian software (later to be taken over and destroyed by Nokia and Microsoft but that’s a story for another time), there I deployed Connected Data protector which
Security Meltdown and Spectre 2018 is certainly kicking off with an interesting set of security issues that affect all processors in use today, Intel, AMD, ARM and so on. In short the three vulnerbilities are: Meltdown -
2018 - a few plans A new year can often mean new years resolutions and a new begining for others. For me, I see it as a chance to set a few targets and try to do better
Exploring Microsoft LAPS I've been playing with Microsoft's project Honolulu quite a bit. I do think that it could become a very nice, full-featured server management tool that is used to administrate Windows core and even
Security Can we tone down the GDPR Hysteria? I think I may have invented a new phrase today “GDPR Hysteria”, it’s when a company/management team/data protection officer takes the requirements of GDPR and dials them up 11 and
Tools Forget telnet for testing ports, use portqry I keep coming across situations where techs use telnet to see if a remote port is open or not. Please stop using telnet for this especially as the results it gives back can
Security Human Factors in security incidents Over the years, every security incident has had its roots in some level of human factors. It's my belief that each time there is a security breach there needs to be an investigation
Security Why website security matters - a practical example. This happens all too often, someone will contact me and try to sell me something, an IT service, a new way of doing things, it doesn't matter. The thing is, if I'm contacted
Honolulu Trying out Project Honolulu At MS Ignite MS announced project honolulu which is a management tool for Windows servers. It's a bit like the server manager you see in Windows 2012 R2 but designed as a webpage
Hypervisor Disaster recovery and why Hypervisor HA may not be best One of the things I always caution against is relying on hypervisor HA, all too often it won't give you the results that you expect, have a read of my blog over on
Encryption Only terrorists benefit from WhatsApp Encryption This utterly ludicrous headline was written today and posted on twitter. First of all, the article is behind a paywall and I don't have access to the rest of it so I can't
datatacentre Disruption, the new marketing gimmick and why I don’t care for it. Before I start, I want to draw your attention to a good friend and marketer, Laura Lilienthal, with whom I've had an interesting discussion about the word disruption. You can read my take
StarWind Exploring Starwind’s Cloud VTL software Starwind have very kindly provided me with an NFR licence so that I can try test our, and blog about their cloud VTL product. Announced at VeeamOn, the StarWind cloud VTL product is
Politics Avoiding Fatigue related errors More and more these days I'm seeing IT folk feeling pressured to work longer and longer hours to fix problems when an outage hits or when a project is late. This sort of
Vmware Tracking down the cause of high VMWare network traffic using pktcap-uw The other day we started to see an odd issue on a VMWare host. We have a lot of monitoring in place so the issue was picked up pretty quickly. This is the
Outage A follow up on the British Airways outage More details have emerged on the BA outage with a detailed article being posted on the register. As with my previous blog, I'd like to go through the register article and add my
StarWind You can't have too much monitoring As part of my series of blogs for Starwind, my latest one covers the type of monitoring that I use in both corporate networks and my home lab. Monitoring has to be one
Disaster Recovery Reviewing the British Airways IT failure It's probably not escaped anyones attention that British Airways have had a major IT failure today, the big question around this is why the failure is not at 10 hours in and still
Veeam News from VeeamON After attending VeeamOn last week, I wanted to highlight a few things that Veeam announced during the conference as there were certainly some interesting advances to Veeam, all coming soon. Universal Storage API
Attending VeeamOn and Spiceworks All Access Earlier this year I was given the privilege of being renewed as a Veeam Vanguard for a second year in a row. Veeam is an awesome piece of software and something I'm very
Administrivia Migration from blogger to ghost After some awesome feedback on twitter, I decided to migrate my blog over to Ghost. The main reason being that Blogger doesn't support SSL for custom domains. It's possible to use SSL if
Security Atlassian accidentally DDOS'ed their own password change service. As a company, if you're facing a suspected security breach then forcing your customers and clients to change passwords is not a bad thing to do. However, when you do this don't end
