Jul 26 2014
"640kb ought to be enough for anybody." – Bill Gates, 1981 That quote, while Bill Gates claims is apocryphal has nonetheless become cautionary shorthand for a situation where you arbitrarily limit your design under the inevitable false assumption that no one will ever need to exceed your design specifications. I suspect that this quote is …
Jul 21 2014
Due to the nature of how PowerShell was designed, it actually offers direct access to the .NET framework which means we can do some pretty cool things. For example, with only a relative few lines of code, we can create a full “Visual Basic” style GUI based application entirely in PowerShell! The catch to this …
Jul 13 2014
This HOWTO describes how to programmatically obtain the timestamp of a file on a remote FTP server. This can be useful in situations where you only want to check, update or delete the newest or oldest files. I opted to create a HOWTO for this as I found a large number of requests for this kind …
Jul 04 2014
This HOWTO describes how to resolve a situation where a running virtual machine suddenly abruptly powers off and when you attempt to start it again, you are given the error “the content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID of the child”. In this instance, a virtual machine …
Jul 01 2014
Last year I wrote a post on how to write Japanese on a western style keyboard. You can find that HOWTO along with some fascinating backstory here. As I was already comfortable with Hangul (Korean), that meant that of the “big 3” Asian languages, I had a (very) basic comprehension of how to write with …
Jun 15 2014
Consider the following scenario: You have a physical IBM server running Windows 2008 R2 with an LSI SAS controller PCIe card connected to an IBM LTO5 tape library and controlled via NetBackup 7.6. You wish to obsolete the Windows 2008 server and move the SAS card onto a new IBM x3650 M4 server running ESXi 5.5. …
May 28 2014
I have several RAID5 NAS devices at home that are built upon the excellent FreeNAS. One of the catches to using FreeNAS is that you must dedicate an entire drive to the operating system. This means if you have say 3 1.5TB drives, you have to allocate (and therefore lose) 1.5TB of disk space to …
May 12 2014
Update: Andrew G in the comments posted a link to a newer version of this script for newer versions of vRanger. You can find that link here: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/data-protection/f/4784/t/19555569 This HOWTO describes how to resolve an issue with vRanger 6.0.1 whereby ALL jobs be it existing or new, incremental or full always fail with the same …
Apr 20 2014
This HOWTO describes the fastest way I’ve figured out thus far to deploy net-new Windows 2012 VMs using VMware Workstation for a Lab environment. The first thing we need to do is build our "golden master" VM. For our purposes, we will be using the Windows 2012 R2 180 Trial ISO which is freely available …
Apr 08 2014
March 31st was World Backup Day (http://www.worldbackupday.com) This special date is intended to help raise awareness to the importance of having backups of your data. In my case, having served in the role of a Systems Administrator for many years now, I’ve repeatedly been saved by some kind of backup in my professional life and …
