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
Fun with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a powerful tool that comes with any of the paid editions of SQL server. By design its main function is to extract, transform and load data into databases however by mixing in CSV exports and PowerShell commands it can help automate various workflows. Although I won’t delve into too much detail in this… Read more
Happy New Year!
A happy new year to everyone!
Moodle and Capita SIMS – Database enrolment (a short how to)
One of the holy grails of Moodle is having it such that students are added to the right courses in an automated way. This becomes particularly true if you have individual courses for each and every class each of which could have up to 30 enrolments to go through (just far to many to do using manual methods). Moodle has… Read more
Windows Authentication when using Safari on iOS8 does not work – Workaround
In recent testing with iOS8 (specifically 8.0.2) we’ve discovered that any web application (in particular we’ve got a number of in house applications that were built using Visual Studio Lightswitch 2013) that relies on Windows Authentication (on Microsoft Internet Information Services) simply does not work. In particular users get to the login prompt screen to enter their username and password… Read more
Where I work…
Well the new school term is upon us and I have (at last!) had the time to do a photo of my office setup. In the photo above we have- 2x HP 23bw 23″ IPS monitors These beasts recently replaced a pair of 1440×900 resolution monitors – given that I’m doing a lot of database work at the moment it only… Read more
Plantronics Voyager Legend – Firmware Update
Just a little snippet before hitting September…..Having recently tried to update the Firmware on my Plantronics Voyager Legand at work (using a Windows 8.1 problem) I found that the MyHeadset Updater (http://www.plantronics.com/uk/product/myheadset-updater) tool cannot handle web proxies (without having the URLs it tries to reach out to being in a authentication bypass list). As I only had one headset to… Read more
Cloud Coffee…just a little fun!
A few days ago I saw something on a social networking site about what Pizza would be like if it was a ‘Cloud Service’ – afraid I don’t know who to credit for it so I won’t post it here but I did give into temptation and make my own about Coffee!