Ramblings of a Sysadmin

Random stories about life, problems and technology all within the world of IT.

Ramblings of a Sysadmin
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Technical

FSMO Confusion in multiple domains

When I teach classes on Active Directory I will cover various domain models including the empty root domain model, this model has several security,delegation and political based benefits that I will cover

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Technical

Creating a Default User Profile

One of the things that annoys me about windows is the Default User profile. This is the profile that a new user who logs onto a machine (or server will get). The way

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Tips

The power of the human mind........ to fail.

The human brain is an amazing computer. It can store almost infinite quantities of data, it has near instant recollection to enable you to recognise people, places and perform the essential day to

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Tips

3,000 test users

Do you ever have need of a few hundred to a few thousand random names to populate your Active Directory in order to test something? This is the requirement I had a few

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Tips

Display FSMO role holders

Imagine the scene - You are consultant and have been asked to fix an Active Directory issue - One of the first things you need to find out is where all the FSMO

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Tips

Migration of DHCP database

On my home 'production' network I have a single Active Directory server that runs DNS and DHCP. Whilst not fault tolerant it does the job and for a network that can afford the

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Technical

VMWare offer free P2V conversion tool

I have a windows 2000 domain controller that I want to clone and put into my test network so I can rehearse an upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007 and to test

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Tips

Common Question - How do I move the hibernation file?

Simple answer - You can't. Longer answer - When the PC boots NTLDR knows where it's boot volume is. On that boot volume resides hiberfil.sys - The operating system will take a

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Tips

Working with TCP/IP Networks

In my previous blog article I gave a couple of troubleshooting tips on DHCP. I also mentioned that I would show a trick for working out TCP/IP subnets. There are MANY subnet

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