Byte sized for when a nibble just isn't enough!
TechUG April 2020 For those who attended my TechUG presentation – thank you. Below you will find links to download my presentation along with the GitHub code repository. Please note the slides are meant as talking points and do not necessarily include all topics or information discussed as part of the ‘live’ presentation. The talk … Read more
I’ve been working on a PowerShell support function to assist service desk personnel and escalation teams in diagnosing issues on client systems. Recently I finished uploading my work to GitHub and creating milestones and a planner to track development. You can find the code on GitHub at this link – https://github.com/bytesizedalex/Get-SupportInfo Please note – this … Read more
I came across a server today that was running low on disk space for the OS C:\ partition. It only took a moment to find a TXT file on the root of the drive that was around 40GB in size. It goes without saying that there was no hope of Notepad opening the file to … Read more
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
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
If you have ever replaced VMware vCenter server certificates you will know that there are default values for common SSL/TLS certificate attributes, for example country code and organisation name. By default VMware have their own details for these attributes as shown below – Country – US E-mail – [email protected] Locality – Palo Alto Organisational Unit … Read more
I finally got round to creating my colleagues and I an account on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). If you haven’t looked into it then basically it is the cloud version of Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) which is typically run within your own environment and managed internally. We have been looking to move … Read more
This week one of my colleagues has been performing updates on our hypervisor hosts including those running Hyper-V. During this work we received alerts from our monitoring system to indicate two of the hosts had essentially run out of disk space, obviously a little worrying. We stopped the update process while troubleshooting was carried out … Read more
Windows systems write blocks of data to underlying storage – the size of these blocks is given various terms, for example – Block size Allocation unit Cluster size The important thing to consider is that this unit of allocation can have an impact on the performance of systems. By default Windows will format a disk … Read more
One of my Trend Micro OfficeScan servers recently started to experience problems resulting in IIS 503.2 error messages being displayed. This was rather poor timing as I was actually in the process of migrating OfficeScan clients to this new server running version 12 or XG as they are calling it. After some work with Trend … Read more