Vmware VMware’s Photon and containers in VMware I've been exploring VMWare's photon and containers in VMware via Photon. From my experiences, Photon works incredibly well and is faster than other distros in VMware. I've written more about it here
Vmware Avoiding a gitlab style outage with Blue/Green deployments As most of you are probably aware, Gitlab is, in part, a source code hosting repository which suffered something of a major outage just a few weeks ago. Unusually, they posted a very
Active Directory Fighting Azure AD Connects custom installer I’ve recently been spending more and more time looking into various cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure. One of the projects I’ve been working on required the on-premises active directory
Dr Do you really need a Hyper-V cluster? Something I've come across a few times over the last couple of weeks is people asking for a Hyper-V cluster because management are demanding HA and 100% uptime. The problem is that a
Projects Reviewing Vodafones IT failure A few days ago, The matters under investigation were a consequence of errors during a complex IT migration which involved moving more than 28.5 million customer accounts and almost one billion individual
Devops The Phoenix Project - a book review - of sorts! There is a book doing the rounds at the moment called "The Phoenix Project" which talks a lot about new ideas coming into the IT world around Kanban and devops. I've
Microsoft NTP in a virtualised world Let me start this off by saying that I love NTP. The whole way the protocol has been designed is truly elegant and it is such an important protocol that is often neglected
Automation Have you used Chocolatey? If you've not come across Chocolatey then it's certainly worth a look. Those of you who have used Linux will be familiar with yum and/or apt-get, well, this is the Windows version
Tp5. Hyper-v Exploring Windows 2016 TP5 - HyperV Windows 2016, TP5 just came out and, after largely ignoring the previews, this one is looking rather good so I thought it was time to give it a bit of attention starting with
Security Just how good is IISCrypto? I've played around with IIS Crypto a fair bit, for those who don't know it, it's a freeware application that can make changes to the registry to restrict the protocols that are used
David Cameron David Cameron wants to Ban Encryption - 2 You can see my original blog article . In a follow up speech David Cameron reiterated his desire to break encrpytion on the UK's IT systems and in a show of the "special
Troubleshooting How to do DNS correctly All too often I see DNS configured using a mix of internal and external DNS servers. This is not the right way to do it at all. here, I explain why that's wrong and what you should be doing.
Troubleshooting My thoughts on handling a system outage If its going to happen then it'll happen at the worst possible time. It'll happen that friday evening just before going home/beer o'clock and it'll be a long weekend plus whatever system
David Cameron David Cameron wants to ban encrypted messages A couple of weeks back, David Cameron gave the following quote: "If I am prime minister I will make sure that it is a comprehensive piece of legislation that does not allow
Vmware VMWare VCenter 5.1 SSO - The worst installer out there? I've spent the past few days attempting to install VMWare's VCenter 5.1 but the installer has other ideas, I first tried the install from build 947939 and each time I am hitting
War Stories 20 little rules for surviving in IT Projects Below are just a few things I've come across in almost 19 years of working in IT. After a chat with a good friend who is considering breaking into It I thought it
Security Test labs and internet explorer patches Test Labs Test labs seem to be somewhat in focus at the moment with my workplace deciding to dedicate a rack to a test environment that'll hold a Netapp cluster, cisco switch, brocade
Projects The four constraints of a Project Today I came across an interesting blog article on . It's about a comment made by Admiral Gehman (Head of the ) regarding Space Shuttle Management at NASA. I've copied the key part below: The
Test Lab Windows 8 Preview I will have to admit that it was with some trepidation that I installed Windows 8 onto an old laptop that I have had lurking around for a few years. This laptop is
Tips Getting the most out of Netapps Filer Simulator As part of my home Test lab I have an older pc running linux that hosts several copies of netapps filersim v7.3.6 - this is purely for functional and svenario style
Netapp Looking at home Storage Systems - FreeNAS As I mentioned in a I wasn't exactly impressed with open filer and I have since found out that many of the openfiler issues are down to a particually . As at the time
Active Directory Exploring GPO Loopback Processing First of all, what is GPO loopback processing? It's a way of deploying user GPO settings to a machine account. Ok, so what's that mean? Inside gpedit.msc are two groups, users and
Dr Blackberry dual outage highlights the need for redundancy in enterprise systems This week Blackberry has been hit by two outages, both of which appear to be caused by single points of failure (SPOF) within the RIM infrastructure. In the news today Blackberry said _"
Openfiler Looking at Home Storage systems - OpenFiler Like many geeks I've got a considerable amount of storage at home - currently, that's around 7TB split between various storage systems and it doesn't include space provided by Hard Drives in various
Security The issue with antivirus software (2) News of a new botnet set up that is trying to be indestuctible thanks to hiding in the . According to the BBC article 'Code that hijacks a PC hides in places security software
