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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. …
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Outlook / Hotmail Down?
After receiving notification on my iPhone this morning that there was a problem with one of my Outlook.com accounts I went onto my computer to try it out. It did not work there either, so I did some investigating. It looks like this system is suffering a major outage today. I am not sure if…
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Resize Live Virtual Hard Drives
I have used Hyper-V for as long as there has been Hyper-V. Today I use it much less than I once did, but it is still handy for running VMs on my laptop. I run a particular VM called ‘Sandbox’ in which I do all sorts of things that I would not want to…
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Free E-Books for your Technical Library
Every so often Microsoft releases a bunch of new books that they give away for free. Most of the time they are for the latest and greatest software and systems, so they are worth checking out. Currently they have books for: Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Windows Server 2016 Microsoft Azure Microsoft Power BI Windows 10…
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A Good Day…
My day started with an urgent matter at the office… It was a small thing to fix but it prevented someone from working, so it was my priority. Unfortunately for some reason I couldn’t connect to my corporate VPN, so I went into the office and fixed it. Because I am not working full time…
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Dickens Had It Right…
Ok, not about everything… It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… This is certainly one of the most familiar opening lines of any book written since Genesis (which, it should be noted, was not a book at all). The opening sentence from A Tale of Two Cities can certainly describe…
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Remotely Enable RDP
Like most IT Managers I manage myriad servers, most of which are both remote and virtual. So when I configure them initially I make sure that I can manage them remotely… including in most cases the ability to connect via RDP (Remote Desktop). But what happens if you have a server that you need to…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 