my world of IT

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

After a fair few months of work and with support from the team at PACKT my new book (Microsoft Application Virtualization Cookbook) is out on sale. With over 60 recipes for the practical application of Microsoft Application Virtualization (Version 5) from every angle including… Setting up your first App-V infrastructure Deploying the software clients and prerequisites Sequencing applications into packages Publishing applications and… Read more

Ever wanted to jump right into a SSH session from an item that you’ve seen in the PRTG Enterprise Console? By setting up a Device Tool its all too easy to do by just clicking on the device and pressing a function key on your keyboard. Note that the Device Tool feature of the Enterprise Console can be used for… Read more

A interesting quirk of an issue with this one; when generating a CSR to secure the iDRAC (version 8) interface on a Dell T430 server it appears that you can’t use an apostrophe in any of the fields else you are presented with a empty/blank csr.txt file (see right). The work around is simple if a little annoying (especially when CSRs… Read more

In this post I’ll be going through the installation of Hyper-V Server on our Dell T430 hosts. Remember you can download and use Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 for free (link) however you must still license the guest Operating Systems. I’ll be configuring a 80GB partition for the OS with the remainder of the storage set aside for the virtual machines… Read more