Trading our Odyssey for a Volvo XC90: the Best PHEV SUV (We Love it!)

Oh, were you expecting a tech article? Nope. For the first article of 2022, I’m shifting gears (pun intended) and starting off with an automotive entry, specifically why we decided to trade in our Honda Odyssey for a Volvo XC90. Some Background At the time, there were two kids running around and one of them was still in a full-sized car seat, so it made sense for us to buy a minivan – especially when … Read more…

Duo MFA with NetScaler nFactor Part 2

Some background There have been several questions and comments around the first post that describes a workaround to get Duo multi-factor authentication working with NetScaler (Citrix ADC) and nFactor. The issue stems from the fact that nFactor authentication uses both advanced authentication policies and it uses the RfWebUI theme – so if either of these conditions were met in your configuration, you were greeted with a rather ugly and non-functioning UI like this: Good news, … Read more…

Go Home Android Discover, You’re Drunk

OK Google: We need to talk. I’ve used and loved Android OS phones for a LONG time now and lately, I really enjoyed the Cards feature in pure Android (Nexus, Pixel, etc). But unfortunately, you changed it to Android Discover and it’s mind-numbingly frustrating and useless now. It used to show reminder cards about upcoming package deliveries, useful news stories and calendar reminders…now it’s almost like it just picks random words from my search history (or … Read more…

Upgrades to the Lab: Local SSD and Hypervisors

Take a look at the #HomeLab hashtag on twitter, and you will see lots of technology experts that have some pretty extensive lab environments at home – add me to that list. OK I’ve been on that list for a while…my lab has gone through numerous iterations: Started with Hyper-V initial release (2008 – KB950050) Ran StarWind Virtual SAN for a while – great performance offloading cache to RAM Moved away from local storage to SAN\NAS … Read more…

Office 2013 on a Remote Desktop Session Host

I noticed that Office 2013 had been made available for TechNet subscribers, so I promptly downloaded a copy of Pro Plus to install on the RDS Session Host farm. When I browsed for a license key I was astonished to find that there was no Terminal Services Enablement Key as there had been for previous versions of Office: You can see here that Office 2010 had this key: I was further angered when I went … Read more…

Galaxy S2 on AT&T ICS Update – How To

After “testing” my phone for two days, I decided it was time to apply the upgrade to my Wife’s phone. She had downloaded the UCKK6 OTA update before I did and thus complained about the terrible battery life issue before I realized that it was the update. I’m hoping that this update will at least alleviate the issue. So first things first – go download Kies: http://www.samsung.com/us/kies/ It’s a fairly simple application that includes all … Read more…

VPN Router on a Stick

Previously, when using a Cisco PIX firewall, VPN 3000 (Altiga), or other VPN hardware as an endpoint for a L2L or remote access VPN connection over the internet, 2 explicit internet facing interfaces were needed to allow internet access for these VPN connections. This was due to the fact that internet traffic would need to leave the internet interface (unencrypted)…..which is the same interface that the original encrypted traffic came in on. So it was simply … Read more…

Windows Server 8: Offline servicing

From the little that I’ve looked into Windows Server 8, my favorite new built-in feature is offline servicing. This was possible in the past with Windows Images (WIM files) using the dism.exe tool, but this new feature looks much more promising – the VHD is becoming a very powerful format.     This will make servicing VMs even easier.  

BE.net 2.5

After a lengthy period of downtime the blog is back up, and is now running on BlogEngine.net 2.5!! Now that we’ve moved in to our new place, there should not be any other major interuptions.