The Grumpy IT Admin

There are a number of real annoyances about computer games for me. I am not a spotty teen cyber punk but more of an occasional middle aged gamer, what I want from my games is entrainment, a good story line, nothing too difficult or involving multiple key combinations or wave after wave of bad guys or a big baddie that requires 2 million hits to kill off at the end of each level. Boss fights are boring at best and mostly an irritating interruption to the narrative, if you must have them then offer an option to jump them or make them easy on the easy mode, preferable think of something different. If developers are going to offer an easy mode then make it easy, if you have some combat system make it simple and easy to use. If hand to hand combat is a minor part of the game don’t make a big thing of it or require huge combos to achieve a kill. I am a PC gamer not a console gamer and it still amazes me when a developer ports a game from a console to a PC and does stupid things like us

Well for me just about everything. Over the years I have been on courses by Microsoft, Cisco, Altiris, VMware and Palo Alto and they all pretty much follow the same formula. The instructor has a PowerPoint presentation or 3 which are printed out and given to you as a manual, the instructor reads from this, repeating what is written and then depending on how good they are adds in some real world stuff and bits to assist you learn, at the end of a module there is some practical work for you to do that is often a step by step guide on how to to do something. So what is wrong with all this? Well lets flip this to a different topic of learning. Swimming. If you wanted to teach someone to swim would you sit them in at the poolside, show them some photos of someone swimming with a brief explanation of what they were doing? Then put them on a plank in the water so they didn't sink and let them read a bunch of words on how to move their arms like the person in the picture? For me t

After spending some time wading through a lot of stats and figures and checking the configuration on all the switches we have partly resolved the problem at our most badly affected site. This always seemed to have extra issues as the problems seemed sporadic and didn't follow the same pattern we saw at other sites. We traced to the problem to two ports that were connected in to the second newer EqualLogic unit. These were showing a number of errors on the switch end. Shutting down these two ports stopped all the latency emails we were getting and now we are just getting the normal pattern were a number of servers all email about latency at the same time rather than random emails from different servers. I have yet to visit the site and ascertain whether it is a problem with the switch, controller or the patch lead. But it just goes to show that if you start at one end and work your way through the path, make sure every setting is what it should be and above all never assume any

Those of us who have to manage patching have a massive problem. There are many vulnerabilities are in applications and plug-ins which aren't covered by any kind of automated process to apply, yes some do come with updating tools but require admin rights to apply patches and you have no visibility or control over what gets applied and when. This is where products like VMware's VCenter protect come in. They allow you patch many different products, both freeware a paid for apps. Great you may think, well yes in principle but ultimately a product like this needs to major or a three things Usability Reporting Applying patches Unfortunately VVP fails on two of these, not just a little fail in my book but miss by a mile. Yes it does apply patches, as best as I can tell, the fails are down to useability and reporting of information. First fail is that there is no remote console, you can only run it on the server you installed it on. Bad. You start by creating management g

We have had an ongoing issue with our EqualLogics systems where they have a massive disk latency problem. We have narrowed this down to 11 second periods where there is no network activity on the controllers. We have passed all the information to Dell but are still without a fix. This problem has been with us from the start across all the firmware revisions. The most affected system is the system that receives the most replication traffic, had has the fewest live servers on it. The only thing we have got back so far is that there is something going on with replication even though the periods we are seeing this are not confined to when replication is happening. Dell obviously want us to upgrade to the latest firmware but this is not a good idea at the moment as a replication bug has been found that appears to throttle replication to around 25MB/s which is not desirable. Dell are not acknowledging this but our suppliers are definitely seeing it and have advised us to not update to

I have been imaging hard drives over the network as part of my working life for more years than I care to remember, this has involved mostly using Altiris' RDeploy tools but also occasionally Ghost and Disk copy and some Paragon tools. Things can wrong if you don't pay attention, I remmber once dropping a DOS image on to our Exchange Mailbox server rather than taking an image of it for DR testing, oh how we laughed, fortunately it was just teh system drive so was quite easy to fix. However after a recent purchase of some Samsung SSDs I had occasion to investigate am recent copy of Ghost 15. Oh dear what were they thinking, or perhaps they weren't. Symantec seem to be making one mistake after the other of late, every major release of software seems to be changed beyond all recognition and useabilty, Altiris 7/7.1, Backup Exec 2012 and now Ghost. Disk imaging should be simple, put a bootable CD/USB drive in, boot to it say copy this disk to this disk and job done. That i

As we support 1500 users we don't manually install anything on PCs. it is all done remotely using, at the moment, Altiris Deployment console (not the nasty web based 7.1 but the rather more pleasent 6.9 with win32 console). We use simple command line stuff to run installers in quiet mode such as MSIs with a /qn or setups with recoreded ini answer files. Every now and again we come across an installer that either doesn't support silent install or tries to do something stupid at the end like display a read me file, complete Muppetry! However we often come across stuff that requires prerequistes installed like Exchange 2010 Management tools. This needs a bunch of Windows features set up in advance, but guess what? The installer knows this but doesn't install them for you and Microsoft doesn't tell you what they are in any documentation or how you should go about installing them, though it does say if you run Setup /r:MT it will install silently, don't believe it, it

Here's some more weirdness related to Exchange. Basically we saw a lot of slowness, not all the time and not on all sites. This slowness would manifest itself in response times from the CAS/HUB server that sit behind a loadbalancer which comes from Kemp. The CAS/HUB servers use the loadbalancer as the default gateway, now for all our traffic this worked extremely well, the only issue we got was this slow down. Even connecting to the server via RDP would be very slow and unresponsive, the cure was to vMotion the loadbalancer. More of a workaround than a fix but it helped. After much troubleshooting and packet sniffing and a conversation with Kemp it was ascertained that if we change the NIC type from a VMXNET3 to a E1000 all our problems would disappear. Surprisingly this actually worked. Now the CAS/HUB servers are much more responsive and don't fall in to an apathetic well of despair. Would I build an Exchange system that was fronted by a loadbalaner again? Probably n

Didn't think I would have to revisit this one so soon. Our Exchange servers were patched up to date with Windows patches and lo and behold all hell breaks loose. Nothing major just users can't connet to their mailboxes from Outlook, again. OWA is fine, it's just Outlook shows as off line, except for users in cached mode, or users that tried 20 times to connect... or that user sitting over there. Moved some affected users to cached mode and all was well again for them, not me though, tried cached and non cached and no joy, tried and new profile and got straight in, back to old profile and no joy, was it the PC updates that went out last night? Well affected users were on a different patching schedule to me so probably not. It must be the patches applied to the Exchange server, we had this last time they were patched with Roll-up 3. So we dropped the one of the CAS servers out of the (load balanced) cluster and rebooted it, dragged it back in and then did teh same w

To do this for Windows 7 and server 2008R2 you need to do the following ·          Pick a 2008 R2 server ·          Apply the 2008 R2 KMS licence key for the server (see below for which one). Do not under any circumstances apply any other licence key. ·          To apply the key type the following at an Admin command prompt o    slmgr.vbs -ipk <KMS key> That’s should be it For Office 2010 do the following 1.        Download and run the KeyManagementServiceHost.exe file on this page on a supported operating system. ( \\codms-1\Apps\Office 2010 ) 2.        Enter your Office 2010 KMS host key when prompted. 3.        Click OK to continue with activation. 4.        Open port 1688 and allow the KMS host service through the firewall. a.        Windows 7 volume editions or Windows Server 2008 R2.                                                                i.       Open Control Panel and click on the Windows Firewall icon.