Byte sized for when a nibble just isn't enough!
Firmware-embedded activation keys have become the standard method for OEM providers to deliver license keys on devices. Gone are the days of a Microsoft label stuck on the device with a license code that may come off or degrade over time. We now have a product key stored in the device firmware which allows it … Read more
I was speaking to somebody recently about how they connect to many remote Windows systems – in this instance they were opening up multiple MSTSC.exe windows and connecting that way. This is something I had done in the past till I came across the Remote Desktop Connection Manager software from Microsoft. It’s a great tool … Read more
For those who attended my TechUG presentation – thank you. Below you will find links to the presentations along with reference documents and URLs that will assist in further reading. If you did not attend please be mindful the slides were talking points and additional aspects were discussed and of course this material does not … Read more
If you’re like me and you have a number of debugging tools (WinDBG, Sysinternals tools, etc) you more than likely have a locally cached copy of the publicly available symbols. This certainly helps speed things up as you don’t have to query the online Microsoft repository every time you use one of these tools, however … Read more
This post covers the Sysinternals tool Du – Directory disk usage reporter. It is the second post in a series covering the Sysinternals suite of tools to help people discover new ones they may not have used before. What is Directory disk usage reporter? Directory disk usage reporter will be very familiar to those who have used … Read more
This is the first post in a series covering various Sysinternals tools – today we will look at TCPView. What is TCPView? If you are familiar with the netstat command you can consider TCPView as a graphical version TCPView displays both IPv4 and IPv6 TCP/UDP connections on your system alongside the process which owns them. … Read more
I recently had to troubleshoot an interesting problem which required me to reboot a server into safe mode a number of times. While I was hammering away on the F8 key during the boot phase I wondered if there was a different way to change the boot menu to avoid the key spamming. That’s what brought … Read more
We’re currently in the process of planning to migrate our existing Microsoft Exchange servers to new hardware running Exchange 2016. Up until the past few weeks the Microsoft recommendation with regard to RAM sizing was to avoid going above 96GB total memory per server. I won’t go into the whole history of why this came … Read more
Recently a colleague was attempting to configure the cluster extension protection (CLX) which is required by our Active/Active HPE 3PAR storage setup. Our Microsoft Failover Clusters are stretched over geographically separate sites and the Cluster Share Volumes (CSV) are spread over the 3PAR storage arrays in each site. We use the CLX software to manage … Read more
Quite some time ago I created a PowerShell function which allowed one to compare a given cryptographic hash against one locally generated to see if they match. Looking back on the old version (here is a link to the blog article https://www.bytesizedalex.com/powershell-cryptographic-hash-checker/) it is very much reminiscent of old school batch files. I decided now … Read more