1 Image 1 of 3 Error 8024400E appears on the clients… After recently deploying a Windows Server 2012 R2 WSUS server (afraid we couldn’t wait much longer for 2016 (which is now out by the way!)) we started seeing Error 8024400E on our clients and servers (from 2008R2/Windows 7 to Server 2012 R2/Windows 10). As it transpires Microsoft published KB3159706 for… Read more
Upgrading MySQL Community Server from 5.1 to 5.5 on Windows
In this guide I’ll show a ‘working’ method to upgrade from MySQL Server 5.1 to 5.5 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. In this case MySQL Server 5.1 was installed by the Microsoft Web Platform Installer some time ago, however this version doesn’t deliver very good performance (and its horribly outdated!) so it was time to get it replaced. The… Read more
Server Room – The latest
Work is coming along nicely with the Server Room, we’ve now removed the last Cisco switch from our infrastructure and the HP 5400R series switch is deployed replacing the 2530 that was in its place; over time we’ll be bringing more fibre from our edge switches into this room as well hence the number of SFP+ ports on the 5400R…. Read more
5 fun applications to think about when deploying Smart Cards
Looking for some fun ways to get more out of your your Smart Card deployment? If so have you tried……? Use Smart Cards to login to your Servers via Remote Desktop Use Smart Cards with the PowerShell Get-Credential Commandlet Use Smart Cards with your Firewall for single sign on Use Smart Cards to login to IIS Web Applications (just a box… Read more
Gemalto Mini-Driver Manager change Admin Key options
If you are looking for a free tool to manage some of the more intricate features of the Gemalto IDPrime .NET and MD cards then the Mini-Driver Manager (downloadable from http://www.gemalto.com/products/dotnet_card/resources/development.html) may well fit the bill. However it has one small downfall in that out of the box it only allows you to manage cards with the Admin Key set… Read more
Setting PIN complexity on a Gemalto IDPrime Smart Card
So after meaning to play with Smart Cards in greater detail for some time we’ve just received a set of cards and accessories from Smartcard Focus (http://www.smartcardfocus.com/) including…. Gemalto GemPC Shell Token V2 (IDBridge K30) (a USB dongle style Smart Card reader which you can see in the screen shot sequence below) Gemalto IDPrime .NET smartcard – SIM cut (to… Read more
Lenovo ThinkPad OneLink+ Dock Review
Front Ports Image 1 of 5 The dock from the front; 2x USB ports (1 of which is powered) and the combined speaker/mic audio jack. Is the desktop dead yet? Well with the 4th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon (i5-6300U/8GB/256GB) and the ThinkPad OneLink+ Dock it might as well be! This powerful little dock has just a single cable to plug… Read more
Deploy Sibelius 8 Sounds with MDT 2013
So first things first….the title of this article is misleading; thus far Avid do not seem to have released a sounds pack specific for Sibelius 8 as you will see on the website when you login in (https://my.avid.com/account/orientation) the only option is for the 7.5 sounds pack. But…this works! Now deploying Sibelius it’s self in a silent manner is (in my… Read more
Powershell Function to prevent a script from continuing if a Domain Controller is offline
One of those monthly jobs that every SysAdmin will come across is good old Patch Tuesday; to help make Patch Tuesday a little more fun after all of the servers have been updated I use Hyper-V Replica (run by a PowerShell script) to shutdown each Virtual Machine and move it onto another host (ticks the box for the machine reboot… Read more
MDT does not apply WSUS updates
A silly gotcha more than anything else…. after recently updating my WSUS server to use SSL (to allow publishing through the firewall) I noticed my clients that were deployed with MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) were not installing updates as part of the Task Sequence; indeed the message log at the end indicated that the updates could not be downloaded as… Read more