Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
Recently, the second [Media only] hard drive in my HTPC started to fail – my Wife heard lots of good old clicking coming from it. So I checked the SMART status – which reported OK, but there was clearly something wrong with the drive. I also happened to be looking in the BIOS just to make sure everything was OK, and I noticed that all of the SATA ports were set for IDE emulation mode! … Read more…
I recently updated both of my Parents’ systems to Windows 7 – and last night I was asked to “Get rid of the security on my Mom’s Outlook”…?…My first thought was UAC. But then- what the heck was she doing that was popping up UAC?? So upon further investigation, the issue was quite different. In Outlook, anytime a web link was clicked the following error showed: This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in … Read more…
I recently moved everyone’s U:\ drives from an old crappy ‘NAS’ device…it was setup with 4 disks in RAID5- in the OS…needless to say software RAID5 tends to lead to terrible disk performance…especially when the processor is only a 3.0G P4. The shares are now on a file server VM with TONS of resources, and things are already better. I finally got around to re-configuring the old NAS into something a little more useful – … Read more…
Who says you can’t teach an old laptop new tricks? About 7 years ago, my Dad and I purchased new HP laptops – I needed one for school. The two that we purchased were very similar- the one I had was an HP\Compaq NX5000 and his was an HP\Compaq NC6000. They look nearly identical, but the NX model is maybe 1\4 inch wider. About a year ago mine died (or so I thought…another post for … Read more…
This morning I went to create a new user account for someone that started today (uber-last minute request). I log on to the Exchange server (exch 2003- so this is the only place that the exch tools are installed) and try to create the account- only to receive the following error: Active Directory – An error occurred. Contact your system administrator. Wow, that was helpful- thanks for that…I AM the administrator. I then proceed to … Read more…
Just got most of the upgrade done for my home RDS setup- upgraded the TS box from 2008 to 2008R2 – thus making it an RDS box (Terminal Services is no longer…it is now Remote Desktop Services). I also upgraded the Web Portal\RD Gateway to a 2008R2 box. I have got to say, with the upgrade are some MUCH NEEDED improvements. One thing I had never tried before was the Desktop Composition remoting (aero glass … Read more…
After attempting to P2V the OWA server, and subsequently failing…I decided it would be FAR better just to migrate and build a new VM from scratch- and not to mention this would allow me to get rid of yet another stupid hostname and use something that makes sense. On top of the hostname was the fact that this server had started life as a 2000 box with Exchange 2000 installed, then was upgraded to server 2003 … Read more…
I am quite fond of WDS – especially in 2008 R2- especially since the WIM files can still be used to contain an XP image. While this does work, you cannot do any of the awesome offline servicing that you can on images of newer operating systems. I have only run into one issue with my current WDS deployments – AcerPower 2000 machines. These are very small form factor machines from Acer that are all … Read more…
In building 2 new Citrix servers from scratch over the past week, I’d been having a bit of trouble with the customizations. We already had a customization file for the Citrix farm, but a few new settings needed to be added. The first issue that I ran into was that the new file did not run with the install at all- and gave an error – something like “This update file cannot be applied as … Read more…
A user had reported a weird issue last week- when she would open Excel (All Citrix Environment- unrelated) Excel would open with a dozen files- they looked like recent documents. She didn’t have time to let me troubleshoot it at the time, so it was put off. Today I was asked to fix the issue- it still existed. The usual questions were asked: “When did this start?” “Did you change anything?” “Did you change anything??” … Read more…