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
Jump right into a SSH session from the PRTG Enterprise Console
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
Requesting a CSR from Dell iDRAC gives you a blank file
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
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 end to end deployment – Install Hyper-V Server
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
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 end to end deployment – Dell iDRAC configuration
In this post I will be covering the basic configuration of iDRAC as well as getting ready for the installation of Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. In this server configuration I have plugged a network cable into port 1 of the on-board NIC which will (initially) be used to host iDRAC, the management connection for the OS as well as… Read more
Windows 10 Mail – Your Outlook account settings are out of date – Fix
After giving the Customer/Technical previews of Windows 10 a wide berth (just haven’t had the time to play with them) I’m now finding I quite like Windows 10 on my Surface Pro 3 (i5 128GB); an interesting issue though – whenever I launched the new Mail app I found I was presented with the error message- Your Outlook account settings… Read more
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 end to end deployment – Project Goals + Hardware
Time for a new series of posts! In this series I will be looking at the end to end deployment of a pair of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 hosts along with supporting services including networking and backup. This kind of deployment is an excellent option for anyone who is looking to run Virtualisation but without the cost of VMWare… Read more
Knackered your iDRAC 8 web console by uploading a Custom SSL Certificate Signing Certificate? – Fix
A bit of an interesting one today; while provisioning a pair of shiny new Dell T430s I had obtained and uploaded a valid 3rd party signed SSL certificate to the iDRAC interface with a view to ensuring that whenever an administrator accessed the interface they didn’t get a invalid certificate warning. However after uploading the certificate and restarting iDRAC I was presented… Read more
Restarting a Palo Alto Firewall for the first time – how long does it take?
As part of my new job I’ve taken on the management of a Palo Alto PA-3020, on my list of things to do…update the software/firmware on it. The update process its self is pretty simple in that you identify the version you are going to update to, download it, install it and then reboot the firewall at a time that… Read more
Hyper-V Remote Management RPC Server unavailable. Unable to establish connection between Hyper-V Host and Client PC.
An interesting quirk of running Virtual Machines for this post… the background is my ‘main work PC’ is currently running Windows 7; in order to remotely manage a Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 machine I had installed Oracle VirtualBox onto my main PC and inside that had setup a Windows 8.1 VM to remotely manage the Hyper-V Server instance. However after setting up… Read more