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SCOM: Unmanaged?
Congratulations! You have installed System Center Operations Manager, and you have installed all of the management packs that you needed. Unfortunately you are getting that big, ugly, EMPTY green circle… you know, the one that is supposed to have green check marks in them? Yeah, it happens to me too. The solution, often enough, is…
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SCM is gone… Say Hi to SCT.
For the past several years nearly every client of mine (that I have consulted on Active Directory) has been introduced to the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager (SCM), a great tool that helped create Group Policy Objects (GPOs) for any number of Organizational Units (OUs), including Default Domain Policy, Domain Controller Policy, Client Workstation Policy, and…
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Hyper-V Server Clustering Network Issue: Validation Failed?
If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times… When you build a Failover Cluster on Windows Server make sure you run the Validation Tests… and make sure those tests succeed (or at the very least nothing FAILS… Warnings are acceptable). So as I sit at a client trying to cluster two Hyper-V…
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Fifteen Tabs: Shut em all down!
Those of us who try to keep the banging of our heads against a wall to a minimum will have long since learned that we don’t know everything, and more often than not there is someone out there who knows more than we do. “But Mitch, how can you say that? I read your blog…
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Will you pay?
An article showed up in my Inbox today: Intel Core i9: It’s not whether you need 12 cores, but whether you’ll pay for them. It is an interesting read, and a very good question. I have always liked ZDNet. Their people do a good job of keeping a pulse on the industry. Their question is…
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A New Perspective…
This blog is older than I ever thought it would be. So every once in a while I like to give it a facelift. This morning you should notice a big difference. I picked a new template last week. I have modified it though… the pictures in the cover are shots I took in Cuba…
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Windows Server 2016: A pet peeve
Over the next few weeks, as I do my first production infrastructure implementation based on Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, I am sure this list will grow longer. In the meantime, I have uncovered my first pet peeve in the new version. Don’t get me wrong, overall I like Server 2016… but to…
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Firewalls: Trust me!
I have several clients who have multiple sites, as well as multiple Active Directory (AD) forests. As security is so important they want to lock things down the best they can, but they also need to open up the necessary ports to allow the domain trusts to work. The ports required for this are: Port…
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Windows To Go Gotcha in Windows 10
So here’s an interesting fact about Windows To Go. When Windows 10 first came out I was still running Windows 8.1 on my corporate desktop, and when I went to create my WTG image I couldn’t because the Windows 8.1 WTG engine did not support building Windows 10 WTG keys. Ok, that is understandable. Windows…
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Scheduling Server Restarts
If you manage servers you have likely come to a point where you finished doing work and got a prompt ‘Your server needs to reboot. Reboot now?’ Well you can’t reboot now… not during business hours. I guess you’ll have to come back tonight… or this weekend, right? Wrong. Scheduling a reboot is actually pretty…
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A Big, HUGE Microsoft Security FAIL.
(NOTE: This article was written December 7, 2016. Not one word has been changed since that date. To understand why it can only now be published, read the article on this site called 107 Days: A Microsoft Security Nightmare. -MDG) For reasons that will become obvious, I am going to delay posting this article until the…
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107 Days: A Microsoft Security Nightmare
I have held off talking about something for quite some time. I do not mess around when it comes to security, especially for my critical accounts. When the actual security of an account has been compromised, as was the case with my Microsoft Account, I do not advertise it. On December 7th I sat in…
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Outlook / Hotmail: We’re back in business
According to the dashboard Microsoft Account authentication is back on-line. I have confirmed this is the case for my accounts, but hope you are having the same experience.
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Outlook / Hotmail Issues Acknowledged
When I posted my last couple of posts Microsoft was reporting that ‘All is Well.’ Dashboards were green, nothing to see here. That has now changed: So we know now that the issues are pretty serious… at least, serious enough that they are now acknowledging them. As for me, I have been having an issue…
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Outlook / Hotmail Down: Update
So the worst fear of hundreds of millions of computer users has been realized today. As I reported a little while ago, Outlook.com and Hotmail.com are down. But it goes much deeper than that. If login.live.com is down (see screen capture) that also means that OneDrive, Skype, and even XBox Live are out as well. …
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 