Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
The iMon remote controller was always able to turn off our Media Center by itself – but then when a Logitech Harmony remote is introduced, things got ugly. 9 times out of 10, the PC would NOT shut down when the Harmony sent the command. This is likely due to the complexity of the iMon remote commands. This was alleviated when I switched the iMon manager software to recognize standard MCE remote commands instead of … Read more…
We have used an HTPC for nearly 4 years now – and yes this includes using Vista Media Center. There have been a few revisions – completely open setup to test, ClearQAM\Analog tuners, different video card, ATI DCTs…The biggest, and probably best feature is the ’10 foot’ interface – controlling everything with a remote control. I chose the Antec Veris Fusion silver for the case – it has an iMon VFD\remote eye built in to … 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…