Well, I resigned myself to the cold hard truth. After many years in a career largely built upon the ability to support Microsoft enterprise systems I have to admit it: Microsoft Sucks.
Here’s why.
I work for a very large nonprofit humanitarian organization. In all fairness, we have received generous gifts from Microsoft in the past. However, [...]

continue reading.....

Does this mean it is SLOW memory?

continue reading.....

I used to have a nice Dell workstation at work, XP Pro, a GB of RAM, a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, and some kind of P4 2.x GHz processor and it worked quite smoothly and briskly. (these are important and very technical terms, take note: smooth and brisk). I then let my boss convince [...]

continue reading.....

This is a typical Microsoft weird issue you might spend weeks trying to figure out and it is as easy as un checking a check box.
Problem: When connected to my internal LAN via VPN client, or through IPSec tunnel I can’t upload FTP files to my internal FTP server. Additionally, when trying to access external [...]

continue reading.....

Symptom: I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on my IBM X31 laptop. I use DHCP locally and two local Microsoft DNS servers for my private domain, socci.local I try to ping my local hosts: server1.socci.local, server2, etc… in all cases I receive “unknown host”. I can ping other domains. nslookup resolves the ip addresses correctly [...]

continue reading.....

I don’t really talk about gear or gadgets much unless something about them is just so impressive, or so disappointing that it motivates me to do so.
I like to maintain good security practices in my personal as well as my work computing environments. I also enjoy being able to provide myself and the networks I [...]

continue reading.....

One of our developers was concerned today that the logs/backup drive on his SQL server was running low on space. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to throw a script together that does the following:
1. Enumerates (or singles out) each drive on the server
2. Determines the free space on those drives
3. Returns the result
This was [...]

continue reading.....

Disaster, recovery and contingency planning is the biggest task we on the infrastructure side of things are focused on right now.
This initiative got a little bit of needed push this past summer when a 100 year old steam pipe burst in front of our office building forcing us out, with no access whatsoever to our [...]

continue reading.....

So I’ve been pretty busy lately. My company adopted ESX 3.0.1 Enterprise last year as part of a massive IT refresh project.
I joined the company in May ‘06, my boss had been there a few months, and the CTO had been there about a year. Neither of them are still with the company and as [...]

continue reading.....

I thought I’d get started with a little bit of basic Cisco. I’m constantly referring to my own notes on these commands. Here are some basics.
Let’s assume that you already know how to log into the device and have the necessary passwords to get you into Enable mode to configure your Cisco IOS device.
 Perhaps the [...]

continue reading.....