Crosspost from my personal blog at http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com.au
Hi,
Windows To Go is a new feature that comes with Windows 8. This will let you run Windows 8 straight from a USB rather than an internal hard drive, which lets you move around and use almost any hardware without much effort. There is a bunch of information from Microsoft here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831833.aspx if you care to read further.
Why use Windows To Go instead of just doing a few tricks and installing Windows 8 on a USB?
Windows To Go blocks access to the local hard drive - this may be good in corporate environments, but bad for home users and enthusiasts (which is why Windows To Go is part of Windows 8 Enterprise and not all flavours)
Windows To Go has built in protection if you accidently unplug your USB stick. It will wait 60 seconds before killing off your frozen Windows 8 session. If you plug in the USB stick again before the 60 seconds is up, your session will continue with a little warning about the dangers of unplugging a USB ...
Get your KMS Server ready for your new Windows 8 clients and Server 2012 OS's!
Hi,
Now that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are out, any company that uses KMS keys needs to add the new ones from Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center https://www.microsoft.com/Licensing/servicecenter/Downloads/DownloadsAndKeys.aspx
First, there's a hotfix for your existing KMS server available here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2691586/EN-US
Once you request the hotfix, get the email and download it, and install. The install will require a reboot, so if you've got this on a critical server you're going to have to schedule a reboot.
A few change request forms and approval signatures later, you'll be finally ready to add your shiny new keys in.
Now, here's the installation instructions from the link above:
Installation instructions
If you have a KMS host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows 7 SP1, follow these steps to perform an upgrade: Install this update (KB2691586). Restart the computer when you are prompted. ...
Today's blogpost is about password management. I have (what I think) is a
good solution that means you'll only need to remember a few small
details for all your online passwords.
(crosspost from my personal blog http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com.au)
Hello,
Today's blogpost is about password management. I have (what I think) is a good solution that means you'll only need to remember a few small details for all your online passwords.
An entirely unexciting topic for most - including myself. You've all heard and possibly uttered phrases such as 'the longer the password the better' and 'use complicated passwords' which are of course true. Here's a blurb taken from Intel's Supplier Password rules via https://supplier.intel.com/Auth/PasswordRules.asp :
In order to protect your security, Intel has certain rules for choosing passwords.
Please read the following rules so that you will know how to choose a good password.
The following rules apply to all passwords:
The password must be at least 8 characters long.
The password must contain at least:
one alpha character [a-zA-Z];
...
Keep refreshing for updates today! 12th April 2012
13th April
I had to rush off to the airport and crashed out, back home in Adelaide now. It was a very interesting event, and was great to get the opportunity to talk to some key HP staff. I'll summarise the whole event in a few days once I've absorbed it all.
3:30pm
Bit of a gap as this section was particularly technical around layers, zones, repositorys, pools, catalogues - you get the idea :)
3:00pm
Architecture Deep Dive for HP Cloud:
IT becomes the service broker, and also needs to choose where to put what. It should also be designed to be able to be moved from one environment to the next.
This requires a common foundation. There are three layers for an Integrated cloud platform to cover all IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (hmm most things seem to be in threes today) - Demand - User Interraction, Deliver - Service Orchestration and Supply - Resource Operation.
2:25pm
If someone uses your hosted severs for an attack, who is at fault? The provid ...
Make sure you refresh the page for the latest updates.
11:10am
I have just realised that the times are Adelaide times, not local :) Lunch time, so after that I'll continue with Part 2.
10:44am
HP Enterprise Cloud Services: Global Availability, Communications & Collaboration, Enterprise and SaaS Applications. One of the bigger benefits is Testing as a Service which should dramatically decrease configuration and setup times. The big goal is to doing the right scale for the right cost. HP do end to end migrations.
10:33am
The current evolving state of hybrid delivery is a mix of traditional, private, managed and public. The future envisioned will be using common architecture, coverged management & security, open & standards based, develop once - run anywhere, and flexibility & portability. This is needed to reduce complexity of managing too many different evironments by too many different methods.
9:49am
HP Converged Cloud is built on OpenStack technology, and works on a ...
This review will not use the word 'Phablet' or 'Tone' to describe this device.
Hi readers,
I have been trialling out the new Samsung Galaxy Note. For those of you who haven't heard or seen this phone before - it's huge. Huge compared to any other phone you've seen with a 5.3” WXGA (1280 x 800) screen. Check out the official specs here: http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxynote/note/spec.html?type=find
The first thing that came to my mind when deciding if I wanted to test this device was this Dilbert comic:
Source: http://www.dilbert.com/2012-02-23/
So, can a device still be a good phone, while being large enough to be a tablet? After playing around with it for a while, my personal answer is 'yes', but it's still not the best solution for every scenario.
The first thing I noticed about the phone after taking it out of the box, was the size. Suprisingly the phone is quite light, thin and study despite this. After realising I also needed to put the battery in, it was still quite light. Pow ...
Intregration is a scary thing to many Admins and Engineers...
Hi,
An opinion piece here, so please poke holes and post criticisms below.
Lately I have been going through a lot of system changes at work. That is to say, more than normal, and most at the early stages. We've been stuck in a state of limbo, mainly because the several systems we want to upgrade or change all talk to each other in one way or another. I'll first briefly outline one house of cards, and then move to what should have been done better, generally speaking (or typing as the case may be).
We are on Exchange 2007, and want to go to Exchange 2010. That's not too difficult you may think, you can build your whole new Exchange environment and move a few mailboxes over for testing, then just do a mass mailbox migration over the weekend and everything's great.
This would be true, if several other systems weren't leveraging off of Exchange 2007. Firstly, voicemail. Our phone system will pass unanswered calls through to the Unified Messaging Exchange 2007 server, which means ...
The new Telstra 4G service, read inside to find out my initial experience and quick tests to see how it performs.
Hi,
Thanks to Telstra, I've been given a 4G card to trial - so let's see how we go! This is just a quick 'Out of the box' experience and not intended as a full review or guide.
First, I've put the SIM into the rather short and fat 4G modem, and plugged that into my laptop. It's autodetected and kicked off an installer. Several minutes later, the installer is done and launches the Telstra Mobile Broadband app! But, it's saying 'Cannot detect SIM card'. What have I done wrong?
I pull out the modem, open it up and switch the SIM card around the other way. It's not too clear as to which way it's supposed to go, but looking at the manual it does confirm I had it incorrectly inserted. Back in it goes, and look it's now detected and showing me signal strength! I click the 'Connect Now' button and am instantly connected.
The Telstra Mobile Broadband program pops up a top news story, as well as giving me links for some Online Services - BigPond H ...
I can't be bothered standing on a streetcorner yelling my crazy ideas, so here's one I've typed up instead.
Hello,
Lying in bed last night, I had a revelation about where I can see us heading in the next few years. This is mostly reliant on better broadband though (hello NBN!) but regardless I believe my idea is where we are heading.
Firstly, if you use more than 1 PC/device then you'll know the frustration of having to either do multiple installs of applications you use, or re-do settings. A good example of this is your browser's favorites/bookmarks list. Sure you can type in the websites, but it's nice to have a full list to just choose from. To fill this void, services like Delicious http://www.delicious.com/ popped up - your bookmarks in the cloud! Now it doesn't matter where you are, you can access that same list.
Email went the same way - Outlook is nice to use, but it doesn't help you when you're at work and want to check your personal emails. Again, the solution was to have your emails in the cloud and sync all your devices/PC's to that single point, or even just use a web interfa ...
Will SMS be replaced by Facebook? Will Email be replaced by Google Plus? Read on for my thoughts on the topic, raised on Triple J's Hack program 21/09/11.
27/09/11 Update: Tommy Tudehope has written an article on his thoughts here: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2913064.html
Today I was listening to the current affairs show 'Hack' which airs daily on Triple J at 5:30. One of the topics today was from a Social Media Consultant Tommy Tudehope (on Twitter at @TommyTudehope), who was predicting that SMS would be dead in 5 years, and Email dead in 10.
For the audio of the broadcast: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2011_09_21.mp3
Webpage of Triple J's Hack: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/podcast/
Tommy's claims:
"... People think SMS is one to one, of course it is, but is it really private, who has access to it, and are you always relying on your service provider Telstra or Optus to connect you through."
"...A lot of businesses have trouble working/collaborating with other businesses so sending mass emails to different people who you're working with. Now with Google Plus, you can h ...
The Cloud - Monkey (from Monkey Magic) had one, should you use it too?
Has your CIO/CEO/IT Manager done this?
Do you trust the cloud?
I would be surprised if you whole-heartedly said 'yes'. Firstly because you're talking back to a blog post which is quite strange behaviour, but secondly because there's a lot of media attention going on in this space.
Just to rehash the last week, there were two major events, one from Google and the other Microsoft.
Google:
Wednesday 8th September (ish, it's hard to gather what timezone they're all talking about) saw a Google Docs outage. The outage lasted 52 minutes: 23 minutes from being alerted to kick off a rollback proccess which then took 24 minutes to do. Add an extra 5 minutes - the time it took for "the additional capacity restored normal function".
The cause was due to a change they had implemented to improve real time collaboration, but the heavy load of the real world exposed a memory management bug.
Micr ...
How do you know if one Group Policy Preference occurs before another?
Hi again everyone,
Today I'm sharing something that I have just found out about, thanks to the very helpful Alan Burchill (Twitter) who is a MVP in Group Policy. Thanks Alan!
So, I've talked about Group Policy Preferences before - wonderful, and not widely used enough yet - but they'll do pretty much anything you could do with a login script with the added benefits of high granularity, GUID and targeting based on almost any criteria you can think of rather than writing complex scripts and error reporting in event viewer.
I came into a scenario where I needed to delete all of the files in a directory, then copy several files back into that same directory. As I created this, I then wondered how I'd make sure that the delete occured before the copy. If it happened the other way around, the end result would be an empty directory!
If you're doing multiple settings of the same type, then they get an Order number as per the screenshot below. You can move the ord ...
Where did your career start? Here's the story of how I managed to get the letters 'I' and 'T' into my job title.
Hi,
I thought this would be a good discussion point. I'm sure we have some readers who have a passion for I.T. but may not know where to start for their career, and there'd be some interesting stories on how some of us managed to get our way into the industry.
Personally, growing up I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do - but I did know that I liked computers, and spent a lot of time on them from a very young age. My Dad was a computer technician in the hardware and building PC's sense - so I sort of assumed I'd do that. After doing some work experience with him, and being put on a production line (he was higher up than that) being told to sort out a box of screws to different sizes, I decided I probably didn't want to be a computer technician after all.
After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad's new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the j ...
You've probably heard of CCNA, but here's a detailed explanation. It also doesn't really matter about the Cisco bit, it's general networking that anyone who deals with networks should learn and understand.
Hello,
I thought I'd share with you my experience with taking the first steps to be Cisco certified. I didn't really know what to expect when I started, but hopefully for anyone else considering doing their CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) or CCENT (Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician).
This is part 1 of 2, as I've only gone so far as doing CCENT. It's half way to becoming a qualified CCNA, and a lot of good fundementals in general networking. To explain further, the first half of the CCNA course is called CCENT 1 (which is just CCENT) and the second half is CCENT 2. You can either do a seperate exam for CCENT 1 & 2, or just a full CCNA exam which contains questions from both courses.
At this point, I'll quickly mention that if you've done your CCNA pre 2007, the course changed and became a LOT harder. So if you see someone's resume listing CCNA, find out when they did it. Also, Cisco certs are only valid for 3 years unless you do another exam!
So what di ...
A light hearted look at the iPad 2 and it's new features. Part opinion, part technical specs, but fully poorly written and thought out!
It's an Apple product launch day, so fanboys and haters are all excited to see what's come out of the pome factory (an apple is a type of pome, thanks wikipedia).
The iPad 2 by all accounts, is a whole 1 better than the iPad 1, even though the iPad 1 wasn't actually called an iPad 1. What does this extra 1 mean?
It's thinner, 33% smaller. Smaller is better.
It's faster, 100% faster CPU. What that really means is it's a dual core. It's also 900% faster in the graphics department, which to me indicates the iPad 1 didn't have very good graphics. I think part of this is that some high graphics quality games have started to come out in the App Store, and really a lot of people want an iPad as a casual gaming device.
It's got cameras. Two! Just like your iPhone 4! The front is VGA, so facetime chats are the only thing it's good for. The back camera will take 5 megapixel stills, and record video at 720p. At least that's what I can make out, there's so much misinformation on th ...
The exciting experience of having to move your SCSM database, documented! Please save your yawns for the end.
Hello autechheads,
Continuing on from my post a while back about my initial experiences with SCSM SCSM Initial Experiences there have been a few developments.
Firstly, the Exchange Connector I referenced which allows connection to an Exchange mailbox for jobs, has been finalised. Hopefully it will appear in Microsoft Downloads soon...
SP1 was also released on 16th December (Technet Blog Click Here) which has a bunch of improvements, including SQL Server 2008 R2 official support. The install for me was incredibly easy and smooth, just running the update on each server/client without any issues or anything notable.
So, there's a few more reasons to consider migrating to SCSM. Some of the limitations I mentioned on my first post are still there, but there's a bit more support and maturity with the product already.
I have found myself in a situation now, where I need to move the databases from one SQL server to another. Sounds easy? Why am I asking you question ...
Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) for Internet Explorer 8 & how to set your default search engine.
Hello again,
Today I thought it would be worth having a look at this utility!
For starters, here's where you can download it: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/bb219517
Why download it? What does it do?
The IEAK is used for settings in Internet Explorer 8, and can either be as part of the IE8 deployment, or after initial deployment. If you're on Windows 7 then you'd really need to use it after since it's built into the OS already. There are some painful ways to do a lot of this with importing registry keys etc, so this is a much neater and nicer way. There are 100's of settings in Group Policy and Group Policy preferences for IE8, but IEAK is better for the newer features. Here's what IEAK does (shamelessly stolen from Microsoft here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/cc889351.aspx).:
Accelerators. You can include custom defaults for Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8.
Web Slices. You can add Web Slices to your custo ...
Hello,
For the last few weeks, I've been working on Microsoft's latest addition to the Systems Center suite, Systems Center Service ManagerYes I'm spelling Center the American way, because it's the product name :)
For those who haven't been keeping up, here's what products come under the suite so far: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/default.aspx
It ends up being a lot of initialisms and acronyms (learn the difference, SCOM is an acronym, SCSM is an initialism) that are all similar and ...
Hello,
For the last few weeks, I've been working on Microsoft's latest addition to the Systems Center suite, Systems Center Service ManagerYes I'm spelling Center the American way, because it's the product name :)
For those who haven't been keeping up, here's what products come under the suite so far: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/default.aspx
It ends up being a lot of initialisms and acronyms (learn the difference, SCOM is an acronym, SCSM is an initialism) that are all similar and confusing. So today, we are discussing SCSM.
SCSM http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager.aspx is Microsoft's offering for a helpdesk which follows ITIL and MOS (acronyms ;) ). It will also integrate with SCCM for your assets and software, and SCOM for alerts and monitoring. It's more of a framework than an out of the box working helpdesk system.
You want some docs? Here you go http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/arc ...
Following on from my iPad review, here's my opinion of the iPhone 4.
Good %timeofday%,
I'll start by voicing my opinions on what I expected: a 3GS with a 'torch' and a slightly nicer screen, and a waste of money for anyone with an existing 3GS. Was this the case? Read on!
My new iPhone 4 (again provided by my lovely workplace) arrived. Packed in a rather small box, I removed the clear plastic and eagerly slid off the lid. Why was I getting excited again? It's hard to avoid all the hype, and even though this is not a device I would pay for (I'd love an Android!), I still do enjoy the iPhone experience.
The phone is, of course, boxier looking than previous models, but I must say I prefer it. It looks cleaner and neater - the volume buttons, being separate, are nicer to press too. Apart from that, there's not much difference apart from needing a micro-sim. It's a bit of an annoyance to have to swap sims over, but I'm sure that extra several millimetres of space saved is utilised somehow. *cough*
Anyway, as I wa ...
Apple's latest gadget, the iPad. It's shiny and lots of people want it, but find out the details below!
This review is about the new Apple iPad. I am lucky enough to have one from my place of work for testing purposes (thats what IT professionals call it when they get new toys to play with). I have been testing the 64gb 3G version. The six different models are:
16gb, 32gb and 64gb all with and without 3G.
The 3G model requires a micro sim, which is a normal sim card but Less plastic around it. As our provider Optus was unable to get any, they unofficially advised us just to cut up a regular sim down to size. I did this, and it worked first time! I have no idea why Apple decided to go against the current standard, it's not like normal sims are very large anyway.
So, I opened up my sparkly new iPad and powered it up. I am immediately told to connect it to iTunes... Great. Another thing that I'm not sure why apple forces, but it only takes a few seconds and the ...