The IT Crownd

Wow! Ok so I am somewhat behind the times here but I was investigating how to "stand up", to use the LINUX community parlance, an instance of the excellent MediaWiki on a Windows 2012 box and came across a Microsoft blog talking about WebPlatform Installer 5.0 So far this is awesome. Basically download it and have a play. You simple select from the lists what you want the installer to download and install - I think it even installs the required Windows features for you too - it happened so quick I'm not sure!? Want MySQL database?  MediaWiki?  Just select em.  Then click install - I had to provide MySQL root credentials to setup MySQL. More when I know how it went - initial thoughts are that this is MAGIC! Happy Friday!

Ok so this isn't really to do with patching well only slightly. I use the awesome, https://www.ultimatewindowssecurity.com/patchanalysis/default.aspx site to assist with understanding the slew of patches which avalanche their way into my world each month. Using the website below I can convert the HTML tables of Randy's analysis into a CSV! http://www.convertcsv.com/ For free! Astounding!

Something we use here in Cambridge is FileSender for sending large files around... https://www.assembla.com/spaces/file_sender/wiki Simple straight forward.  Done. Once I implement it myself I will write some more!

We have a Kace appliance. A Kace 1000. We "found" this a couple of weeks back and I was duly dispatched to set about configuring and understanding it. After some help from Dell we obtained a DVD to re-image the appliance to v6.3 I am now in the process of sorting out the LDAP integration (done) Patching Windows (done) Dell (done) 3rd Party (done) software installation (done) agent provisioning (almost there!) More news when I have finished things. Oh and thanks to those @ ITNinja! http://www.itninja.com/

Annoying there is lots of information on activating Office 2013 client side but nothing on activating the KMS host - over the internet... It looks like someone panicked at this question and choose No.... This meant that our Office was not activating as expected. Nothing on the interent showed me how to fix this as no-one it seems chooses No. Well no one who wants to use the internet to activate Office KMS that is. Simply bumbling through led me to try C:\>cscript slmgr.vbs /ato 2E28138A-847F-42BC-9752-61B03FFF33CD And Bingo! After 5 attempts were made to the KMS host all was active!

I've recently come into contact with SCCM. I love it. I also love MDT.  So I was pleased to see that they are tightly integrated!  Hoorah! I set about creating an MDT build task within SCCM, easy right? Well...yes. Initially. Err you can't PXE boot to MDT and SCCM.  Unless you follow this website.  Awesome! http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2011/09/07/co-existing-pxe-boot-for-mdt-standalone-image-capture-amp-configmgr-image-deployment-environments.aspx Once I'd got MDT responding to MDT known computers I got the MDT server 2012 build working and was able to get a captured image.  Straight forward an no different to the hundreds of MDT tasks I've set up before. I then had some learning to get this MDT capture into SCCM.  First there was the requirement for an MDT package...This turns out to be the entire MDT deployment point folder structure - including all the scripts.  Far enough.  Then I needed an MDT configuration, this turns out to b

Using Hyper-V here @ new place! To find the mac address of the interfaces you cannot use ipconfig /all (the interfaces are grabbed by Hyper-V and hidden) and systeminfo doesnt seem to list them either.  However you can use a simple DOS command, getmac c:\>getmac /fo list /v Bingo.

New Job I've now left London and am returning to my home town, Cambridge. Hopefully will have plenty to blog about in the coming months! :) Allen

A couple of months ago I posted about some Powershell I had written to report on the state of our Veeam backups. I've been somewhat industrious here and am now on V3 of my script. Requirements : You need to run this from a vSphere install You need Powershell 3 or 4 on vSphere and any Veeam servers You need Powershell remoting enabled on all involved servers As this is an unsigned script you need the execute policy set to unrestricted Edit the script for your environment...SMTP-IP, veeamServers and viServer. Things to do: Get this running the vSphere stuff remotely...no idea why this wont work! Here it is. # # Veeam Report # # Daily Veeam Report # # Version 3 # # Allen Kong 09/01/205 # # Psuedo Code # 1. Get All vms from vSphere #  1a. Connect to vSphere # 2. Get all sessions in the last 24 hours from Veeam # 3. Get all sessions in the last 5 days from Veeam # 4. Process the data # 5. Email the data # # 1. Get All vms from vSphere Function G

We've had an issue for a while where we had a third party put some of our databases into circular logging due to disk space issues. They didn't following the Microsoft guidelines and restart the Information Store/dismount and mount. Our backup solution, ArcServe was unable to complete differential backups of the databases in circular logging mode.  Obviously.  We were getting full backups it was just not ideal time wise. When we disabled circular logging and dismounted the databases as per the Microsoft instructions within 3 minutes we got errors in the event log detailing that a log file was missing.  Consequently the differential backups failed due to VSS being unable to snapshot the database. After talking with the third party and trying various methods.  We were left with little option other than to move the mailboxes from the database into a different database.  This was not ideal. The third party then suggested we try taking a couple of full backups of the datab