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.
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:
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Introduction In this series of posts I’m revisiting an answer to a question that appeared on Server Fault way back in 2011. I’m pleased to say that it’s been viewed over 100,000 times, and I like to think its helped a few of them. But it’s time to look again. Since I wrote that post, there have been some huge intrusions, such as the well known Ashely Madison, Anthem Medical Data and JP Morgan breaches that affected millions of people.
Saturday, September 9, 2017
One of the things that I’ve always been interested in is automation, and being able to reproduce a ‘known state’ reliably and consistently. This applies at work when building servers or workstations thanks to tools like SCCM and Fog, and should be in your grasp at home or in even the smallest office, thanks to Chocolatey. Not to make a fine point of it, between my last post and this one I’ve rebuilt my PC, installing windows from scratch and all my applications, prepared breakfast for my partner and myself, started some laundry, and dealt with the cat pulling the net curtains down in my study.
Monday, August 26, 2013
We’ve always been a VMWare shop. As some of you might know, I’ve been involved in the Microsoft virtualisation stack in the past, writing guides for Virtual PC and bits and pieces for the server products, but on the server side of things, at least, VMWare have always had the lead. They’ve had the advantage of beating Microsoft (and others, but this article isn’t about those) to market and the advantage of being able to concentrate on virtualisation because it’s all they do.
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”.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
We’ve been migrating from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 at work. One very interesting part of SCCM 2012 for us has been the support for Mac OSX that was added in SCCM 2012 SP1. We have about 70 Mac clients, I guess, on top of about 1500 Windows clients, and those 70 clients need a dis-proportionate amount of time to manage, not because of any problems with Mac OSX as such, but rather due to the lack of real tools available to manage a large desktop roll-out.