Ramblings of a Sysadmin

Random stories about life, problems and technology all within the world of IT.

Ramblings of a Sysadmin
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Tools

Review: Stellar Phoenix SQL Database Repair tool

MS SQL data is important, this tool might be able to help recover data when you are in a bad situation

Gary Williams Gary Williams
Security

Why website security matters - a practical example.

This happens all too often, someone will contact me and try to sell me something, an IT service, a new way of doing things, it doesn't matter. The thing is, if I'm contacted

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Technical

Moving into the cloud

Without realising it I've found myself moving more things into the cloud. I'm not exactly reliant on the stuff that's in the cloud but I'm certainly using more services out there and it

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Technical

Common questions - Why doesn't NTP set the time?

Because that's not how NTP works. NTP will take the machines current time and compare it against a reference server (or servers) and then work out how much of an offset to apply.

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Technical

Some DNS Tips

Several times in just the past week I've had to deal with DNS entries that have made things a touch more painful than they should have been so I thought it might be

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Technical

Issues upgrading Domain Schema to 2003

So I'm probably a little behind in upgrading my home networks domain schema to support Windows 2003 but better late than never! The process itself was smooth enough once I'd corrected some problems

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Technical

Centralised Logging

One of the essential features for even a small network is a centralised logging solution. Having a centralised logging tool makes for much easier trouble shooting as it becomes possible to review logs

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Technical

NT4 Emulator Key

If you happen to run a large Windows environment you might be familiar with the in place upgrade method of upgrading your domain to Active Directory. If you run a large Windows environment

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Technical

FSMO Confusion in multiple domains

When I teach classes on Active Directory I will cover various domain models including the empty root domain model, this model has several security,delegation and political based benefits that I will cover

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Technical

Creating a Default User Profile

One of the things that annoys me about windows is the Default User profile. This is the profile that a new user who logs onto a machine (or server will get). The way

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Technical

VMWare offer free P2V conversion tool

I have a windows 2000 domain controller that I want to clone and put into my test network so I can rehearse an upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007 and to test

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Technical

DST Patch for Windows 2000 updated

Just a quick update on the DST issue, I've tweaked the MSI I put together so that it can no longer be uninstalled. This is because the MSI overwrites the timezone values in

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Technical

Setting up Email on Nokia E61

I've upgraded my personal mobile to a Nokia E61 which is based on Symbians 9.1 Operating System and it's a very nice phone especially built for it's extensive messaging capabilities which do

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Technical

NTP & Time Zones

With the upcoming time zone changes, it's worth remembering how NTP works and why it doesn't matter what timezone you have devices in. NTP and UTC both work in the same way, time

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Technical

Troubleshooting DHCP

I had an interesting time quite recently troubleshooting a DHCP problem. The server wasn't giving out IP addresses when connected to the network or when connected to a hub. The reason turned out

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Technical

Unattended Vista Build - Failed first attempt

Unattended installations really do remove the pain from installing an operating system simply because they will answer all the routine questions of user names, serial numbers, country codes and can configure a fair

Gary Williams Gary Williams
Technical

On a quest for the perfect knowledge base

I've been on a quest for some time now. I'm seeking the perfect notepad type application to act as a PORTABLE knowledge base - All too often i'll see a link or find

Gary Williams Gary Williams
Technical

Tape Backups and why they may run slow

Due to an interesting event earlier this week I thought it might be worthwhile doing a quick blog entry on how tape drives work and why some restores of small files can take

Gary Williams Gary Williams
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