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Online Certification Exams – Are they worth it?
Every class I teach I get questions about certification exams. I do not mean about the value of certifications, although there is that too… and I will revisit that topic in a later article. I mean about the exam experience. When I took my first exams, I had the choice of taking it at a…
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How Railroads Railed Us
The standard gauge of a railroad in North America and Europe is 4′ 8.5″, or four feet, eight and a half inches. Most people will give that absolutely no thought in their entire life. Of those who do, some will think to themselves, ‘I wonder if that is based on an old unit of measure…
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Security Baselines in Intune
Okay, if you are a strong believer in cybersecurity, raise your hands. Okay, you can put them all down now. While I know there are people out there who believe that everything should be open to everyone, I doubt they are reading my blog. Next: If you bought/acquired/were gifted/found/inherited your current computer and, before doing…
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Efficiency Experts and Redundancies
I was watching an episode of Chicago Fire on NBC this morning. the firehouse was being audited by an efficiency expert who was not the most welcome addition to the day to day lives of the first responders. He accompanied them on a rescue mission and after they returned to the firehouse the ‘expert’ asked…
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Changing the Date
I was asked by a friend the other day to help them to change the metadata on an NTFS file. I made sure that they were not trying to break any laws, and then I found this PowerShell cmdlet for them: $(get-item ‘.\filename.ext’).CreationTime=$(Get-Date “04/28/2025”) Of course, they were not very technical so I found a…
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CVE Saved… for now?
Last night I posted that funding for the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) database had not been renewed, and that there was a chance that it would go offline. That funding was renewed at literally the last minute. The database has been managed by the MITRE Corporation since September, 1999, and is widely considered to be…
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Defunding CVEs
CVE: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures CWE: Common Weakness Enumeration CVSS: Common Vulnerability Scoring System If you work in the IT field then you are almost certainly familiar with these three terms. You might even know that the databases for CVEs and CWEs have been maintained by MITRE for… well, for as long as I’ve been…
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RSAT Toolkits
I have been an advocate of using Server Core since… well, essentially since Microsoft introduced it in Windows Server 2008. I have also been a huge proponent of the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) that can be installed in the client OS to remotely manage the non-GUI servers without having to become a PowerShell or…
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The Human Firewall
We have firewalls and Intrusion Protection Systems. We have passwords and encryption and VLANs and network segmentation and every type of cybersecurity device known to man… but none of that will stand up against the biggest vulnerability in our corporate organization: the end user. In 1894 the Dutch industrialist JC Van Marken coined the term…
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Format Painting Just Got Easier
If you spend as much time in Microsoft 365 Apps (such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) as I do, then you are probably always happy to learn new tricks. I have been using the Format Painter option for years, and while having to grab the mouse to find the paintbrush icon in the ribbon toolbar…
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Conditional Access: Block a Network or a Nation!
Your company has issued laptops to your employees so that they can work from anywhere. That’s great… until you realize that some of your employees might go on vacation to a country that is not on your government’s Christmas Card list… in fact, you know that your data compliance policy forbids access from those countries.…
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A Light Workstation With a Heavy Load
I have a confession to make: I have not owned a desktop computer since 2007. While I bought my first laptop when I was still in the Army, I went back and forth for a few years until I began to travel constantly for work. When I relocated from Montreal to the Greater Toronto and…
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Apple with Intune: Renewing your MDM Certificate
A year ago I gave someone access to my Intune environment in order to be able to demonstrate how to manage iOS devices, so for the last year I have been happy to manage my two iOS devices (actually several over the timeframe) from the same portal as my Windows devices. It is just so…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 