Charles Socci - Information Technology and Amateur Radio KC2YWZ

From the console in my Taxi this evening… First question my wife asked (she’s also in IT) was, “Did you click OK to terminate the program…”
I said, “Honey, you know I’ve been in IT way too long to do some rookie thing like that…” and so it stayed.

I serve a large organization with multiple branch offices in remote places. Typically, these offices are staffed with from one to fifty employees. Most of the offices have a local Windows Domain Controller, which doubles as a file/print server, DNS, and DHCP server.
The larger of the offices are usually connected to the Internet via T1, [...]

Windows add/remove programs windows components error caused by service pack 3 and nLite.

Why is it that I can Google nearly any event log error or ID in Windows and come up with at least a few references, yet when I use the built in links to research the error with Microsoft at least half the time I come up with, “No results were found for your query. [...]

I’m not a fan of Outlook. I think it is bloated, slow, and prone to any number of issues. That’s me. I like a nice, compact, fast email client that lets me get through all my email quickly. I’ve always liked Outlook Express and wondered why more people don’t pay any attention to it.
I work [...]

Recently I tried to export to a .csv from Outlook. Outlook kept crashing. I tried on another machine, same thing. I had another admin try on his computer, and his crashed too. I found a lot online about software conflicts and plug-ins. None of these applied. I tried Outlook safe mode, still crashed.
The answer was [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]