Administrivia Busy Project Time (2)......... So, It's January 2009 and not much has changed, it's still busy project time. Unsurprisingly the server migration which absolutely, totally HAD to be completed by the end of December 2008 wasn't. How
Administrivia Busy Project Time......... Just when you think it's all going to be quiet and maybe it will be a good time to get those niggling little tasks out of the way and to be able to
Technical Some DNS Tips Several times in just the past week I've had to deal with DNS entries that have made things a touch more painful than they should have been so I thought it might be
Understanding your environment A practical demonstration of why understanding your environment is vital occurred a few evenings ago when some NetApp filer\domino work went wrong. A little bit of background first, domino data is stored
Tools AD Find AD Find is the second of the two tools I managed to find in the same week. This little tool weighs in at just 700K for the download and about 2mb for the
Tools AD Explorer from Sysinternals Sometimes it's possible to stumble upon a tool and wonder just how you would have gotten a task accomplished without it. Last week I had the good fortune to stumble upon two such
War Stories Why Total Cost of Ownership is a fallacy If I have one more potential supplier try and sell me something on the lie that it will "reduce TCO" I will not only scream but I will beat them to
Administrivia VMWare course For much of this week I'm on a VMWare course for the second half of my VMWare training. This part of the course is titled Deploy, Secure and Analyse. The course itself is
War Stories Legacy Systems and a very handy SQL comparrison Tool On Friday, I had the "pleasure" of having to get a legacy system up and running. This system was originally introduced to allow users in the business to manage group membership
Build your own NAS Things have really moved on in terms of storage. Not so long ago the largest hard drive you could buy for a home PC was a 200GB IDE. Today, 1TB SATA hard drives
Technical Issues upgrading Domain Schema to 2003 So I'm probably a little behind in upgrading my home networks domain schema to support Windows 2003 but better late than never! The process itself was smooth enough once I'd corrected some problems
Itil ITIL Overview Training The company I'm currently working at have decided that ITIL is the way forward. Yes, after several years of different ideas, options, tests and other madness they want to adopt the official ITIL
Administrivia Posting update Yes I know I've not posted for a bit. No excuses and I promise I will try to be good for here on in! Lot's of changes at work and enough material to
Security InfoSec 2008 Well, After some false starts involving problems with London Undergrounds District Line I made it to Olympia and to Infosec 2008. The event itself is a good one for picking up the latest
Automation nLite Automated builds I'm a big fan of unattended builds and I've been using them for over five years now. The process of creating an unattended build can be somewhat hit and miss so using something
Idle Ramblings Mac OS I'm not much of a Mac fan. This is simply because I don't have a need to use Mac's. I have friends who use and love the Mac book pro and I've seen
Nokia E61 Mail for Exchange documentation woes Too many times now I've come across badly written documentation. That is documentation that leaves you hanging wondering "what next?" or "where do I go from here?". An example
Security Get ready for a bumper patch Tuesday With no less than 12 security updates coming out of Microsoft later on today and Vista SP1 slated for February 15 there will be a lot of update servers groaning under the weight
Security Call for Eicar V2 Many years ago it was recognised that there existed a need to test AV software without throwing live viruses around and so the EICAR test file was developed as a safe way of
Security First Patch Tuesday of 2008 The first patch Tuesday of the year is rolling around somewhat early this year as the second Tuesday is on the 8th. Microsoft has decided to be kind this month though as only
Security Data lost by Revenue and Customs The news story linked above talks about the UK Government losing 25 million records containing names, addresses, national insurance numbers and bank details. Apparently the data was password protected but not encrypted, Now
Project Management The state of IT I came across the above article earlier today and I know that examples of the above problems are not just endemic to development process but instead seem to be buried deep into the
Security Snooping on Facebook user profiles is a 'staff perk' I'm not a huge fan of Facebook as I really don't see the point of sites like these. Generally, If I've not spoken to anyone in a number of years then there is
Technical Centralised Logging One of the essential features for even a small network is a centralised logging solution. Having a centralised logging tool makes for much easier trouble shooting as it becomes possible to review logs
Technical NT4 Emulator Key If you happen to run a large Windows environment you might be familiar with the in place upgrade method of upgrading your domain to Active Directory. If you run a large Windows environment
