Posts made in May, 2011

As we spend time deploying, developing and delivering new solutions to the end users, the infrastructure behind the scenes continue to evolve and get more complex; which no matter how hard we strive, results in some user some where unable to utilize the environment for some reason or other. Generally the simplest method to resolve the problems, is to see the issue first hand; and for that Screen Sharing tools are invaluable. As I work for an organisation which has a global deployment of Microsoft Lync, accessing the remote screen with the users was normally pretty easy to got quickly into a shared control session. But, this has in recent times surfaced problems, as more users are mobile, the device they are connecting from is not Windows, and even then good old...

Today, I am starting a new series of Webcasts on SCVMM 2012. In the first of these recordings, we fly trough the process of installing SCVMM in a HA environment, and complete the initial configuration of the environment by creating some host groups, profiles and adding our Library server. SCVMM 2012 Installation In this video, I have already pre-staged the basic Windows File Cluster, Installed the SCVMM Pre-requisite’s and configured the container in AD which will host the Distributed Key required to have the SCVMM nodes communicate. For your environment, I recommend that you refer to the blog post on SCVMM 2012 Installation for detailed instructions on putting this framework in...

Working on VM’s daily there are some things which you just wish could be automated, and Linux nodes are no exception to this. However today, one of my favourite Linux VM bloggers for Hyper-V has answered a lot of prayers in a tiny package. Yusuf Ozturk has just created a magical PowerShell Module for setting up Linux VM, called simply Set-LinuxVM. If you use Linux VMs with Hyper-V (or SCVMM) then you need to check this out, As per his own words, some of the features include: 1) Unattended IP, Hostname and DNS configuration for Linux VMs. 2) Automatic Linux integration components installation. 3) Multi Distro Support: Debian, Ubuntu, Centos, Fedora, Redhat and Suse! 4) Automatic CPanel installation for Redhat and Centos 5) Linux VM Template support...

A little while back I completed the deployment of our new Exchange 2010 Edge environment, which was shortly after promoted to full production level as I progressed to remove the final Exchange 2007 nodes from the environment. One of the considerations which needed to be taken at the time was for a very tiny number of users who are still requiring access to their mailbox via the POP3 connectors. Not that this is a real issue, as we could easily create a NAT on the firewalls back to the proxy/balancer and from there connect to the POP3 services on our CAS servers, however in order for these uses to be able to send mails I also needed to present a secure SMTP server on the internet for them also. This was going to be a little trickier, as we outsource messaging...

Elve 1.2 is about to be released, its currently in late beta, and I just learned that my newest 2 drivers are about to be included in the shipping build. The first of these will be the Clipsal C-Bus driver, supports control and monitoring. This driver is coded to interface with the Lighting Application, and to interface to the C-Bus network using the 5500PC module via RS232. This protocol is locked to 9600 Baud, and the driver we reset the interface at start-up The Second driver will be the SageTV Info Popup, which sends messages to the SageTV Infopopup Plug-In. This driver is pretty simple in design and simply allows us to present a popup notification on the SageTV screen. The Service provides no feedback so this driver is a single shoot option For more details...