Bob Plankers, aka The Lone Sysadmin, has posted a series of posts on “the blame game” in modern IT organizations (Blame, Understanding Blame and Preventing Blame).
Bob’s posts are most excellent, and well worth a thorough read. Feel free to head on over and read them now, this post will be waiting right here when you come back.
Are you back yet? In fact, Bob’s excellent rants has inspired me to write my own! No, I’m not going to talk about blame in IT. I have another little pet peeve, and that’s passion.
The fourth edition (Big Fat Pipes with Bob) of the vSoup podcast is now available. This time we had the honor of having Bob Plankers as a guest. Bob runs The Lone Sysadmin, where his recent post “Blame” really resonated well with me personally.
The fact of the matter is that in many cases Bob is right, virtualization admins ends up being blamed for everything.
No matter who’s fault it actually is, though, I’m the one-stop shop now for blame.
How very, very true.
The third episode of vSoup has been spotted in the wild. Head on over to vSoup.net to grab it while it’s still warm. Or, you can frantically refresh your iTunes feed until it pops up there.
Either way, it’s alive!
Remote Desktop Connection Manager is a great tool from Microsoft which enables you to keep track of all your RDP sessions and targets in a nice GUI. One of the things it’s lacking though, is some sort of Active Directory connection that allows you to import all your server objects directly, and not manually add/remove the serves as your infrastructure changes over time.
In an attempt to bridge that gap, I’ve made a very small PowerShell script that queries your Active Directory for server objects and dumps their names into a text file that you can import into RDCMan. This is a very simple solution, but works great in my environment.
Jan Egil Ring over at blog.powershell.no has created a great PowerShell script that lets you run the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer on remote Windows Server 2008 R2 machines.
In short, Invoke-BPAModeling.ps1 queries your Active Directory for any machines that run Windows Server 2008 R2, runs BPA on them (if Windows PowerShell Remoting is enabled) and emails you the report.
Great tool that should be in every Windows Server admins tool-belt, and probably also set as a scheduled job to make sure you stay up to date on your servers status.
The second episode of vSoup is now available. Head on over to vSoup.net to get your fix.
Chris, Ed and myself keeps rambling about, this time about blogger recruitment, high availability, security and the HP Proliant MicroServer.
Enjoy!
I’ve had another article posted on Petri IT Knowledgebase!
The Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) is a free tool from Microsoft that can help administrators perform licensing and activation related tasks from a single viewpoint. VAMT is currently available in version 2.0, and supports the following products and operating systems:
Read the rest of the article called License & Activation Management with Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) on petri.co.il
Watchguard has recently retired their X series of firewalls and replaced them with their new lineup of XTM boxes.
I took this opportunity to replace my X series firewalls with some from the new lineup, and found a neat way to migrate your existing configuration from old to new in a few very easy steps.
Note: Normally I would not recommend migrating your configuration in this manner. In my mind you should always rebuild rules when replacing your firewall, as it is the perfect time to review and do some QA.
Some times things just happen, and before you know it you’re sitting in your in-laws living room talking to an Englishman and an American via Skype. And to top it of; it’s all being recorded. And to make matters even worse, we decided to try and make it a regular thing. The recordings that is, not the “in your in-laws living room” thing, that was a one-off for sure.
What I’m trying to say here is that yours truly, Ed Czerwin and Chris Dearden has decided that we want to be rock-stars and start our own little virtualization related podcast.
State of the vNinja: 2010
Is 2010 over already? I guess it’s true that time flies when your having fun! 2010 has been a great year for me, both personally and professionally. I won’t bore you to death with personal issues, but as far as professionally goes you’ll just have to bare with me.
2010 was the year I really feel that I got a lot of good work done, and some of that are really significant changes for my organization which is in a way better state IT wise now than in 2009. I can’t take credit for all that on my own, I have some very competent coworkers that are equally to blame/praise for the work we have been able to do in 2010. By the looks of it, 2011 will be even better!
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