It’s that magical time of the year where…new network switches arrive! Given that the new Aruba branding has taken full control of what was ProCurve I thought I should post some photos of the new paintwork. Happy to say the colour black isn’t half bad! Included in the images are J9729A 2920-48G-PoE+ J9728A 2920-48G J9731A 2920 2-Port 10Gbe SFP+ Module… Read more
Category: Hardware
Processors, graphics cards, solid state drives and much more is all in this section of the site!
Server Room – The latest
Work is coming along nicely with the Server Room, we’ve now removed the last Cisco switch from our infrastructure and the HP 5400R series switch is deployed replacing the 2530 that was in its place; over time we’ll be bringing more fibre from our edge switches into this room as well hence the number of SFP+ ports on the 5400R…. Read more
5 fun applications to think about when deploying Smart Cards
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
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
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 into your laptop which provides power and connectivity to the dock. For connectivity the dock includes On the front… Stereo/microphone audio combo port on the… 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
PRTG Push Notifications to Microsoft Band 2 from Windows Phone
Its been a day or so since buying a Microsoft Band 2 (took a while to find a high street shop that had one to try on in the first place!) and its proving rather useful to me as a person who rarely has his phone turned on loud and really never notices the little vibrations from it. My most… Read more
Server Room Progress – Photos
With the front to back patch panel installed and T430s rack mounted the server room is coming along quite nicely. Next up will be a tidy up of the cables at the back of the rack bringing all of the power cables to one side and the network cables to the other. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!