my world of IT

Every once in a while a magical bit of software comes along that makes life so very good; today that software is WebDAV and its been around so long that some people might have forgotten how good it is. The premise goes You have one or more internal Windows Server(s) which hosts users personal documents and shared drives You would… Read more

Since discovering it Munki has made my life looking after Apple Macs measurably easier. In short it allows the centralised deployment of Apple OSX updates as well as the deployment (and updating) of 3rd party software. In the short screen shot guide below I show how to deploy the OSX Impero Client using Munki.

Thin Clients are typically used to connect to VDI/Session hosted environments using though Microsoft/Citrix/VMWare technologies but they do have their other uses… In this post I am going to show you how to setup a 10ZiG thin client (in my case the 5872v) running their custom made Linux PeakOS that will Display status maps from my PRTG network monitor server… Read more

PRTG is by far my favoured tool for monitoring IT infrastructure. With its built in sensors you can check the PING time for a server, check that windows services are up and running or with a little tweaking monitor paper trays in a MFP (and so much more). A recently discovered feature for me is the sFlow monitor. This tracks… Read more

When trying to capture a Windows 8.1 (Enterprise 64bit for anyone that wants to keep track) using the System Centre Configuration Manager Capture Image ISO I kept getting the error message Task Sequence: Image Capture Wizard has failed with the error code (0x00004005). For more information, contact your system administrator or helpdesk operator. The image was as normal as any… Read more

As some readers maybe aware I work in a Secondary School; part of working life at any school is the odd fire alarm/drill. Looking up at my PRTG status monitor screens its quite easy to see at what time that drill happened. Nothing more than a novelty but hey thought it was intresting to see 🙂

There are lots of great reasons to replace personal printers with centralised photocopiers but one of the overlooked ones can be the greater ability to monitor these copiers using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). This article looks at keeping track of the status of the paper trays (how full they are!) using PRTG (http://www.paessler.com/prtg) on Sharp photocopiers. To get rolling… Read more

In this guide I will show you how to create a deployment of Greenfoot 2.3 using Group Policy Software Deployment while ensuring that the software is available for all users of the computer and removing the unnecessary desktop and start menu shortcuts. If you don’t feel like reading through the guide and you want to use the modifications listed above… Read more

School maybe out for summer but that doesn’t mean that the ICT Services team is having time off. One of the high priority tasks since starting my new job as Network Manager at an Academy in Oxford has been updating the storage and no I don’t mean SANs or DAS storage… add in some basic shelving from Rapid Racking and some… Read more

Since the upgrade from Hotmail Calendar to Outlook.com Calendar the import features for calendar files (namely ics) has become a lot easier/simpler. So to see how to import a ics file (for example from a British Airways booking) see the screen shots below.