Byte sized for when a nibble just isn't enough!
I’m a huge advocate of home lab equipment – it’s one of the best ways to learn and grow as an IT engineer or whatever your job title names you. Having stuff you can intentionally break then try to fix or to test something so you are ten times more confident doing it for real … Read more
I’ve been working on our Trend Micro Deep Discovery Analyzer (DDAN in Trend parlance) and today I finally finished off the virtual image which it will use to sandbox suspicious files/URLs. Having finished that work I figured I’d take a look at integrating our Trend Micro ScanMail for Exchange (SMEX) systems so that e-mails can … 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
Microsoft are making some big changes to their Nano Server operating system. I’m going to briefly cover what they are doing and consider how it might impact existing users and future plans for those of us who have not yet deployed it into a production environment. The below was taken from the following Microsoft link … 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
I like my servers configured exactly the way I want – this extends even to minor things like the name of a network adapter interface. I’m slowly rebuilding my lab with the latest versions of ESXi and Microsoft Windows Server 2016. I noticed that my new 2016 servers were creating the network adapter with a … Read more
Well HPE Discover in London was awesome – I must have left an impression last year as various HPE reps around the event remembered me. There was so much to see and I wish I’d taken more pictures but I spent more time talking to people. Let’s take a look at some of the pictures … Read more
Well it’s finally here – Microsoft Server 2016 has been released and is now generally available (GA). I’ve been messing around with the technical previews since they first came out and I eagerly awaited the final release. It is now time for me to start rebuilding a large portion of my home lab environment and … Read more
Recently a critical cluster system had a bit of a hiccup wherein the SQL resource failed between nodes a few times and then gave up. Most of my clusters run on Microsoft Server 2012 R2 so I tend to use PowerShell for everything, in this case the cluster is an older one running Server 2008 … Read more
If you run Trend Micro business products you should really consider running a Smart Protection Server (SPS) appliance in your datacenter. In a previous post I stepped through the process of deploying an SPS appliance in a VMware environment. It is possible to deploy to Hyper-V as well so don’t worry if you aren’t running … Read more