The Grumpy IT Admin

Everyone hates it but it is a necessary evil that we have to go through at least once a year, some twice others, god help their minds, several times. In previous years we have had a truck turn up with a roof that went up to create a two story office, a bit like a low rent Formala 1 paddock truck with a bad paint job. You had the office upstairs and a bunch of racks with a HP EVA SAN and a shed load of servers of your choice and some tape libraries. We would get our backup tapes and recover as many systems as possible pretending we were doing a good job and if it came to it we could recover all our systems within a week, whilst knowing full well we wouldn't have a hope in hell. Now my life is made a lot simpler. We have visualized as many of our systems as possible, these are all stored on some cheap EqualLogics (compared to EVA and all the licenses) and replicated to a remote site. I now sit at my desk and bring online replicated copies of our VMFS partitions, present to our ho

As my little foible, I decided to do a rebuild of my PC yesterday using media with SP integrated. Back in the old days you could use a tool like nLite to integrate SPs in XP media, but no more. You now have to download the media from Microsoft via Digital River here are the links 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium x86 SP1 (bootable) Digital River: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24208.iso 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1 (bootable) Digital River: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24209.iso 32-bit Windows 7 Professional x86 SP1 (bootable) Digital River: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24280.iso 64-bit Windows 7 Professional x64 SP1 (bootable) Digital River: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24281.iso 32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate x86 SP1 (bootable) Digital River: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24394.iso 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1 (bootable) Digital River: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24395.iso Now I have norma