Looking for some fun ways to get more out of your your Smart Card deployment? If so have you tried……? Use Smart Cards to login to your Servers via Remote Desktop Use Smart Cards with the PowerShell Get-Credential Commandlet Use Smart Cards with your Firewall for single sign on Use Smart Cards to login to IIS Web Applications (just a box… Read more
Author: James
Gemalto Mini-Driver Manager change Admin Key options
If you are looking for a free tool to manage some of the more intricate features of the Gemalto IDPrime .NET and MD cards then the Mini-Driver Manager (downloadable from http://www.gemalto.com/products/dotnet_card/resources/development.html) may well fit the bill. However it has one small downfall in that out of the box it only allows you to manage cards with the Admin Key set… Read more
Setting PIN complexity on a Gemalto IDPrime Smart Card
So after meaning to play with Smart Cards in greater detail for some time we’ve just received a set of cards and accessories from Smartcard Focus (http://www.smartcardfocus.com/) including…. Gemalto GemPC Shell Token V2 (IDBridge K30) (a USB dongle style Smart Card reader which you can see in the screen shot sequence below) Gemalto IDPrime .NET smartcard – SIM cut (to… Read more
Lenovo ThinkPad OneLink+ Dock Review
Front Ports Image 1 of 5 The dock from the front; 2x USB ports (1 of which is powered) and the combined speaker/mic audio jack. Is the desktop dead yet? Well with the 4th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon (i5-6300U/8GB/256GB) and the ThinkPad OneLink+ Dock it might as well be! This powerful little dock has just a single cable to plug… Read more
Deploy Sibelius 8 Sounds with MDT 2013
So first things first….the title of this article is misleading; thus far Avid do not seem to have released a sounds pack specific for Sibelius 8 as you will see on the website when you login in (https://my.avid.com/account/orientation) the only option is for the 7.5 sounds pack. But…this works! Now deploying Sibelius it’s self in a silent manner is (in my… Read more
Powershell Function to prevent a script from continuing if a Domain Controller is offline
One of those monthly jobs that every SysAdmin will come across is good old Patch Tuesday; to help make Patch Tuesday a little more fun after all of the servers have been updated I use Hyper-V Replica (run by a PowerShell script) to shutdown each Virtual Machine and move it onto another host (ticks the box for the machine reboot… Read more
MDT does not apply WSUS updates
A silly gotcha more than anything else…. after recently updating my WSUS server to use SSL (to allow publishing through the firewall) I noticed my clients that were deployed with MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) were not installing updates as part of the Task Sequence; indeed the message log at the end indicated that the updates could not be downloaded as… Read more
Hyper-V Replica Reverse Replication with Certificate Authentication ‘Hyper-V failed to establish a connection with the Replica server ‘‘ on port ‘443’. Error: The connection with the server was terminated abnormally (0x00002EFE).’
While working on my most recent Hyper-V Replica PowerShell script when attempting to reverse replication from a source Hyper-V host to the a target host using Certificate authentication I was getting the error message… Hyper-V failed to establish a connection with the Replica server ‘<target hostname>’ on port ‘443’. Error: The connection with the server was terminated abnormally (0x00002EFE). As it… Read more
Dell T430 Castors – what do they look like?
Having recently purchased a Dell T430 tower server which we will be using for backup and Hyper-V replica I thought I’d share some photos of what the castors (an option in place of either the rack mounting kit or the floor stand feet) look like! The castor assembly comes in a separate box to the server and only takes a… Read more
Tweaks to make the PRTG WMI Memory Sensor results more helpful
The screenshot above shows a portion of the sensor in its default form; in this post I’m going to show how to… Remove the red ‘downtime’ line from the bottom of the chart Set maximum and minimum values of the graph to display 0 to 100% Set the gauge to display its value in GByte instead of MByte Red Downtime… Read more