infrastructure
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Introduction to Microsoft Mobile Device Management I'm currently settling in to a new job where I'm spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft's Mobile security management tools, mostly Microsoft Intune. This is largely what I was doing towards the end of my old job too, and while there's some great people writing great material out there, I think there's a lack of articles that try to start at the beginning with current (as of April 2019) tools and pull all the strands together, so that's what we're going to talk about here.
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Monday, September 3, 2018
I talked previously about using Chocolatey for home use. It makes building a PC at home nice, simple and fast. It makes supporting non-technical friends and family nice and easy, ensuring you can build their computers how they want and keep them up-to-date with just a few simple commands (that can even be put in the scheduler, so neither you or they have to worry about them).
We’ve recently just completed a Windows 10 rollout at my college.
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Sunday, August 26, 2018
Introduction So I think a lot of us take backups for granted. It's one of those things you look at once and then tend to not worry about too much. As long as its working, why worry? Except… if you don’t look at it, how do you know how well its working? I’m talking from the viewpoint of a senior engineer or manager here of course, hopefully if you’re a junior engineer who has been put in charge of backups you’re making sure that the current system works well and telling people about any concerns you might have.
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Thursday, August 23, 2018
IntroductionOne of the new features in Windows 10 1803 is the ability for "local Active Directory" Domain joined workstations to allow users to reset their password from the login screen. This was introduced for Azure Active Directory joined systems in Windows 10 1709. In this post I’m quickly going to run through what you need to do in order to configure this for your domain. I’m making the following assumptions:
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Saturday, November 22, 2014
Wireless is already ubiquitous in any modern home or business these days, yet it’s one of the areas that probably most upsets employees, managers and IT staff all alike. There’s an assumption that business WiFi must be easy because anyone can purchase a cheap home wireless router and set it up at home, so how hard can it be to do the same thing for a business?
Actually for a small business where you’re just providing connectivity for one or two people with their work laptops and maybe a mobile phone or two in a small office, it’s probably not too difficult at all.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Let me just start this post by saying that professionally at least, I’m a happy Dell customer. I’ve built up a good relationship with them over the years, met senior Dell staff and we almost exclusively use their server & storage infrastructure where I work, we’ve used them for consultancy in the past, and I’ve been delighted with the results. This is not me hating on Dell.
But I am going to have to take them to the woodshed over a recent post by Andre Meier on their corporate blog, “Tablet matters - taking the right decision”.
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Thursday, March 14, 2013
We are almost exclusively a user of HP Procurve switches where I work. We have a wide range of models that we’ve used at both core and edge and have been happy with them over the years.
One important part of our current toolset for managing switches is the HP Procurve Manager Plus management tool (another part is the invaluable tips on the evil routers website). Once you move beyond a certain amount of switches it becomes inefficient to manage them all by hand and tools like this which allow you to bulk manage error and performance logging and manage switches in bulk become invaluable.
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Thursday, March 7, 2013
If you do then my condolences, but you probably don’t. And if you don’t then however bad your day at work was, it’s probably not as bad as the network admins over at EA.
How is it that everyone except EA themselves could see this one coming? For some time now EA and Maxis have been working on a ‘reboot’ of the massively popular SimCity game.
As part of the run up to this launch EA announced that the game would require an always on connection to the Internet, because whether you want to or not you pretty much have to play the new game as a shared ‘online’ experience.
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