my world of IT

Buying powerful PCs pre built is all so well and good but the fun comes in when you build them yourself! That’s just what we have done at work with some media suite PCs which use 6 core processors, modular PSUs and all other kinds of fun things – full specs and photos to come after the video.

Ok I’ll admit this is a pretty weird thing to do a review on a PoE injector but its one of those things that I wish I had to reference when I was first looking at these. First things first if you are looking for a basic PoE injector that can run power at about 15W max then this injector… Read more

They have blinky light parties! (click to see bigger pictures)

Its looking like we got our sizing for our custom RDS servers right and we may well have answered (at least for own internal use) ‘how many users can you get on a RDS server?’. The video shows our RDS farm under normal load with 24 clients remotely logged in (excluding the admin session I was using) with the CPU… Read more

For quite some time now I’ve been a tad baffled about why the correct homepage settings are not being applied to users through group policy on first time login on recently deployed PCs. Quite often instead of reaching our intranet they are just greeted with the about:blank page. A gpupdate /force fixes the issue quickly however naturally this is not… Read more

A few days ago a interesting problem cropped up with a WordPress website that I maintain for a 3rd party, the error occurred every time I tried up upload a file to the site using the fantastic WP-DownloadManager plugin and was saying… Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/admin.php on this server. After trying a few possible solutions .htaccess (all… Read more

After recently setting up a Moodle install (hosted on IIS on Server 2008 R2) with SSO (LDAP server based (good old Microsoft AD) with NTLM looking after things) we found that any new users were getting this error message appearing. Fatal error: $CFG->dataroot is not writable, admin has to fix directory permissions! Exiting. The simple solution is to this problem is… Read more

UPDATE – This article has been replaced by this one (link), with a newer, faster A10 APU! A few days ago an article posted on the so called consumer tech blog Cnet.co.uk (link) seriously annoyed me; they claimed that for a little less than £350 you could build a gaming PC. The things that got me about their article were Use of a… Read more

Having recently setup DFS-R and DFS name spaces we found that our users were reporting that a security warning was popping up every time they opened any file from our DFS shares (example above). The warning in Word 2010 was The file  originated from an Internet location and might be unsafe. Click for more details. The silly thing about it… Read more

If you have ever tried to boot a VirtualBox VM into PXE (Microsoft WDS/MDT based) using the default Intel PRO/1000MT Desktop adapter you may have seen the error message FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted. The simple solution to this problem (and to get you booting into WDS) is to install the VirtualBox extension pack which can… Read more