my world of IT

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

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!

As part of an ongoing project to improve the room today we’ve been installing a set of rails for a pair of Dell PowerEdge T430 servers. You may have noticed the ‘T’ in the T430 to indicate they are tower servers but Dell provides a 5U rack conversion kit which is pretty easy to install. One small question came up… Read more

Following from Automated backup for your network switches with WinSCP and PowerShell you can take things one step further and with a little more PowerShell its possible to get email reports on any changes between switch configs. This kind of setup would be useful for any sized organisation who have a need to ensure changes are logged or want to ensure that no… Read more

Although it may not be the most glamorous side of IT every sysadmin will appreciate the value of a rock solid backup system. All too often though these systems do not extend down to the ’embedded’ systems like network switches and firewalls. However with a little WinSCP (and its fantastic .NET assembly automation package) and PowerShell combined its pretty easy… Read more

Have been having a bit of an interesting issue over the past few weeks whereby our Hyper-V Hosts (Dell T430 Tower Servers) would loose network connectivity at seemingly random intervals; the only resolution was to restart the server or to remove and replace the network cable. After much investigation looking at the servers and associated network switch we discovered that… Read more

Having recently jumped into the world of Windows 10 IoT the first stumbling point seems to be Installing an app (which has multiple dependencies) onto my Rasberry Pi 2 Model B using the AppX Manager. In particular after selecting the AppX file, the Certificate and listing out the Dependencies I get the error: Commit deployment Error source: <appx file>.appx Error… Read more

A typical issue for administrators of small server rooms (perhaps only one or two racks) is keeping cables tidy between servers (which have their network ports on the back) and network switches (which have their network ports on the front). One way of reducing this problem is to have a patch panel at the front of the cabinet and a… Read more

In this final post we’ll cover the Configuration of Network Settings and setup of Remote Management for a Hyper-V 2012 R2 Server which will be managed from a Windows 10 Enterprise PC. There are quite a few steps to go through for this part of the configuration of the Hyper-V deployment however a number of these steps can be applied to… Read more