I'm personally not a big fan of iTunes but I recently noticed an issue where a couple of users had installed it and it had defaulted to saving their music library to their Home Directory. This usually wouldn't be an issue for most people but I redirect Home Directories to a share on a file server. In order to mitigate against what could have potentially been a requirement for additional disk storage I decided that advising users to change the location of their iTunes library from the default (which unknown to the users was a file server) to a local location on their computer was the best option. Here is a generalized version of the instructions I gave to network users.
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Our company Intranet was deployed on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and has been in operation for a few months. I recently had a user that reported that they were experiencing difficulties opening documents from their Team Site. A quick check revealed this problem actually affected all documents for the user and not just those in their Team Site. When the user clicked on any SharePoint document to open it they were presented with the dialog box with options to open the document in 'Read Only' or 'Edit' mode. Opening any document in 'Read Only' mode opened the document in the relevant Microsoft Office application but obviously did not allow them to save it directly back into SharePoint. Opening any document in 'Edit' mode failed to launch the Microsoft Office application associated with that document. This was the case for all Microsoft Office document types.
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Following on from a previous post about creating and using an RDP Hyperlink on a computer running Windows, I have written another two .bat files for use with SSH and SCP protocols.
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I recently started using Zenoss (an open source application, server and network management platform) to monitor servers. One of the options that can be configured for each of the devices being managed is a hyperlink that can open a website or application of some relevance. In a situation where I am informed of an issue with a server/application I instinctively try to open a Windows remote desktop session to the server. This used to involve manually opening the Microsoft Terminal Services Console (mstsc.exe), keying the server name and then clicking the connect button. I wanted a way to click a hyperlink from the Zenoss web console and establish an rdp session to the relevant server.
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When vSphere 4 became available I was keen to upgrade all of my hosts and vCenter servers to start testing features like Fault Tolerance, Site Recovery Manager, and vCenter Linked Mode e.t.c. The host upgrade went smoothly using VMware Update Manager. Similarly, the upgrade of all vCenter servers was also without issue. A short while after, I needed to add RAM to a group of hosts and all was fine until I booted the first host post upgrading it's RAM.
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I have been using System Center Configuration Manager to deploy software to clients for a while now but I recently had a requirement to control a client remotely. In order to control clients using the SCCM Remote Tools feature, some ports needed to be opened on the client in the Windows firewall.
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I was trying to deploy some software to a Windows XP SP3 client when I noticed that there seemed to be an issue with network connectivity. For some reason the client hadn't downloaded and installed any software hat had been pushed to it via SCCM. On the off chance, I happened to check the computer name in 'System Properties' (to see who the computer belonged to) and I noticed that the buttons for 'Network ID' and 'Change' were greyed out.
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I wanted to install some DRAC 5 cards into each of my Dell PowerEdge 2900 VMware ESX hosts, so I decided to VMotion off the Virtual Machines onto other hosts in the cluster before shutting down the node. The first Virtual Machine migrated without a problem but when I tried a second I received an error stating the there was a CPU incompatibility between the host and the Virtual Machine.
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Every now and then I need to resize (usually extend/enlarge) a disk attached to a Virtual Machine. I have tried several methods to do this over the years (including combinations of VMware Converter, third party partition manager apps, diskpart etc) but none have been as efficient as the method I discovered during recent VMware training for my VCP4 exam.
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At work, people were using VPN to access their email out of the office, but I have always thought that logging into a corporate network via VPN for most users is an extra hassle that they could probably do without. I had considered setting up RPC over HTTPS for Exchange 2003 but during a meeting regarding disaster recovery it became evident it was actually now a necessity. So, after configuring the server for RPC-HTTPS I had the small problem of deploying the settings to Outlook clients en masse.
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