Dales MCSE Blog

This blog Has Moved

2009-07-30T16:35:00.001+01:00

If you come across this blog please redirect yourself to www.dales-diary.co.uk.

Migration

2009-07-06T20:16:00.001+01:00

Just a quickie to say despite what I've said in the past I am going to migrate this blog to wordpress as since I've started using it as a backup for blogger I've actually discovered I prefer wordpress.

So dont be surpised if you check in over the next day or two and find you get the odd DNS funkyness as it re-aligns with wordpress.

Cheers Ears

Not Much Going On!

2009-06-30T13:00:00.001+01:00

Well due to a thunder storm and various power cuts over the past few days I have not managed to get any studying done. However at work I had a little triumph in getting our wyse thin clients working correctly at our remote site.

So since the site has been up the wyse clients have required configuring to get them to connect to a citrix session, bit odd as we had also set up an ftp site for the wyse clients to suck their config info from but for whatever reason this was not working. Anyway as we have only had one wyse TC go pop since the remote site went live we just got on with configuring the devices.

Anyway I was over at the site recently and decided to have a real crack at sorting it out and after a bit of fiddling and a bit of googling I discovered the answer.

It basically boiled down to the fact that when the ftp server location is given to the wyse client as a dhcp option the wyse client looks for the configuration in a specific directory from the ftp root (/wyse/wnos/wnos.ini) Our wnos.ini file surfice to say was not at the location. So I created the directory structure in the ftp root and altered the wnos.ini config file rebooted a wyse tc and hey presto it begins working correctly.

This of course now brings us the complete added bonus that if another one goes bang we can tell the users to replace it with another one and it will just work the same as the old one. Brilliant eh!

Its little things like that which please me the most!

Moral of the story if you just want to deploy dhcp option 161 for the FTP site then create a /wyse/wnos folder structure so the clients can see the wnos.ini file, otherwise you will also need the 162 dhcp option to specific an alternative folder structure in an ftp site.

Transcender

2009-06-22T12:19:00.002+01:00

Well just a quick update, Transcender have kindly sent me the login details to their product, So over the next few days I shall take it for a spin and write up my thoughts on the product.

Unfortunately I have not been able to look at it sooner as I've been working all weekend and sorting something out to deal with a crow thats been bothering us. (twitterers and facebookers may already know this story).

Couple of weeks ago a crow started knocking on the windows of our house (all very amusing to start with) then he started doing it at 4am every morning(not quite so funny). Now the little blighter has taken it upon himself to pimp our cars by ripping off the wipers and ruining the rubber seals (not water based animal)around the windows by scratching them. So a week or so goes by with me jumping out of bed when I hear the crow in the vicinity and shaking my fist at him through the window (gert orf my laaarrrnnnddd)! So anyway now I need to take drastic steps to stop the black peril. Hence the purchase of a suitable tool, Just need to wait for its arrival so we can "sort him out".

Transcender and wordpress

2009-06-15T21:23:00.001+01:00

HI all,

Here's a quick post about the lovely people at transcender. They have offered me a 30 day trial of their online practice exam product to review. Well obviously I'm very keen on trying the product out and writing my experiences on the product. So thanks very much transcender.

Blatant Plug

Well today I've signed up with a wordpress account to,not to move my account you see but to use it as a backup method. I've never been too happy with all my content in one place. I'm sure that google isnt going to pull the plug on blogger without a good deal of notice but I was always rather uneasy that I didn't have any backups.

So I now use wordpresses handy dandy import tool to automagically import all my posts here and poof you have a complete backup of your blog.

Lastly I'm working on a blog about the data collector service in Xenapp which is actually very interesting I find, so hopefully there will be alot more meat appearing in the blog shortly.

Xenapp 5 Data Collectors

2009-06-13T13:00:00.000+01:00

Configuring the Data Collector Service

The data collector service is the hub of a citrix farm, the data collector responsibilities include but are not limited to:-

Information on published applications
Connected Users
Sessions
Licencing
Server Load
Distribution of the above Information to other data collectors in the farm.

Data collectors operate within “ZONES” inside a farm. Zones are groups of servers that are usually grouped by geographical boundaries. Zones are created to minimise WAN traffic. If for example we had offices in Iceland and one in australia, each would have a seperate zone so that users in iceland connect and lanuch published applications from the iceland zone. This would stop them connecting to the australia zone and incuring WAN costs.

In the above configuration you would still get WAN traffic however it would be minimal as only the datacollectors would be relaying information on their status to each other.

Another interesting thing about data collectors is the “election” process. This is the automated process where a data collector is elected as the primary collector and others as backups. This process is completely automated and can be explained in the following.

You have 2 zones (Iceland and Australia) each has 5 servers within their own zone (so the farm has 10 servers in total) . If all servers allowed their data collectors to chat across the WAN it would increase the amount of WAN traffic and potentially cause confusion. So within each zone the election process takes place. This allows one server to communicate the zones status/info etc to the other zome. However also elected are backup data collectors. This will then become the primary data collector should anything happen to the original primary data collector.

Although this is completely automated there are configuration settings you can change to assist the choice of the primary data collector.

MOST PREFFERED
The first choice for the data collector only assign this to ONE server in each zone. For information this is normally automatically assigned to the first xenapp server installed in a zone.

PREFERRED
The second choice for a data collector, more than one PREFFERED data collector can exist.

DEFAULT PREFERENCE
Default settings for servers, if no settings have been manually chosen for the servers then they go into this level of preference. Also in the event of a MP server failure and no manual preference settings have been configured then elections will occur at this level (simply because the PREFERRED option for a server must be manually chosen.

NOT PREFFERED
This is the runt setting for the servers. Servers in this level will only become data collectors if no others are available.

If you leave all the preference settings alone and let the farm get on with it by itself then when we installed the servers in the iceland zone the first server to come online will automatically be designated the MOST PREFFERED server, the other 4 will get the DEFAULT PREFERENCE.

Publishing an Application in Citrix Xenapp 5

2009-06-12T15:30:00.004+01:00

Publishing an application in Citrix is the act of making an application/desktop available either through the web interface or through the programme neighborhood.

There are quite a few settings to think about when publishing an application that affects not only security but performance of an application.

Applications are published to the access management console and rather than walking through the wizard clicks I will explain the various options you could choose on the way.

So once you have opened the access management console and chosen new/publish application in the application folder you will get to choose the following:-

Name
The first tab where you need to enter information is the name tab, all this requires is a friendly name and description of the app you are publishing.

Type
This tab allows you to specify what you are publishing. You can publish an application (i.e. adobe reader) , a complete desktop (good for using with thin clients) or content (i.e. web page or document).

Location
This is the file path to the applications exe or document.

Server
This allows you to select the server(s) that the application is installed on and you want users to have access too. For example a Citrix Farm consisting of 5 servers may all have adobe reader installed but for whatever reason you may only want users accessing adobe reader on 3 of the 5 servers.

Users
This is where you can specify users/groups that will have access to the published application. You can also specify to allow anonymous access which means all users will have access to the application. In real world Citrix deployments access is controlled by groups as administering individual users access to every application you publish will quickly become a nightmare.

Citrix Application Installations

2009-06-10T13:21:00.002+01:00

Heres A short tutorial on how to install applications in a citrix or terminal services environment. Quite basic stuff but its always good to revisit!

LINK!

vmware sucess

2009-06-01T22:56:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Thought I would post a quick update, as some of you may have read, we had a consultant in setting up our hp servers and San at work for VMWare ESX. Anyway just a couple of days ago I P2V'd our first client facing production server. I've P2V'd loads of servers in the past but no production ones.

Its nice to be able to switch off a physical server thinking of all that lovely aircon and electricity you are going to be saving.

VMware and Windows Server Licensing Tip

2009-06-01T17:30:00.001+01:00

Hi all, Came across a little tip over the weekend, im sure most of you know it but I thought I'd post it here anyway.

For those of you who purchase software licenses for your company and have some kind of virtualized infrastructure its worth considering purchasing server 2008 enterprise edition when you want a new server license. This is because the enterprise version allows you to run 4 guest OS's (any server version from NT4 upwards) on any Host OS. So whilst this is predominately aimed at using 2008 hypervisor to runs guest OS's if you have VMware or Citrix virtualization you could use the license for that as well.

Now at present where I purchase licenses from where we would normally purchase the server STD editions if we buy enterprise versions we would be saving approx 300 quid which is nearly buy 3 get 1 free.

New toys

2009-05-27T21:27:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Again sorry for the lack of posts recently but personal life is currently getting in the way, Hopefully after this week I shall be firmly back on the learning track and posting about my continuing mission.

On another note I have bought myself a new toy, its an aspire one A110 netbook. I really like the device and am very happy with it but at the moment it is suffering from a couple of hardware based issues.
Firstly the battery is not charging correctly. To start with out of the box the netbook does not power on or run on battery power alone. This is aparently quite common and can be cured by a bios update. So I updated the bios and whilst it did make a difference it didnt really cure the issue. The netbook still wont power on without the power cable plugged in but will last about a minute on battery power alone when you pull the power cable out then the laptop dies,all this time the battery charge light flashes orange.

Also another issue is that I cannot get any sound out of the devices inbuilt speakers, however plugging headphones in gets the desired results.

Its a real shame as I really like this little netbook (infact I'm writing this blog on it now), but its RMA and off it goes back to the supplier hopefully for replacement.

Unpleasant experience

2009-05-15T20:44:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Well today I met my first confirmed braindumper. IT was sadly enough a consultant we had in at work to roll out a new service. We were wondering off down to lunch together and my boss happened to mention that I got my MCSA recently. The consultant said he had just taken the 2008 active directory exams, and then said he downloaded them test king (spit) questions. It was at that point my opinion of the chap took a nose dive! Naturally he said he did not get a question wrong. Dunno maybe he did not know what a BD is but still is rather galling that a consultant that is obviously on a damn sight more money than me either doesn't know or doesn't care that he is gaining he cert soup by illegitimate methods!

Faffing About

2009-04-29T13:17:00.003+01:00

Hi all,

Again I'm really sorry for the lack of posts recently but I've taken a break after finishing my MCSA and a few other things have popped up. Anyway I've deceided that I would like to continue on this track and go for the full MCSE. I still want to take a CCA exam as I think that would definately be a good move.

So at the moment I've got an exam cram book for 70-293 which I've read the first couple of pages of, nothing too exciting just yet. Although I am planning to write a tutorial on the first chapter and also maybe a short video (dunno see how that goes!)

I've also ordered the 70-284 mspress book which will go with my exam cram exchange book I got ages ago.

If that wasnt enough I also have a 70-431 book which is a SQL exam , again something else that I am interested in pursuing (but at the moment I fear it will take me a long time to get through that one).

Anyway, I think I will start off with the 293 and see how we get on with that.

The observant amongst you will also notice that I have changed the sub-heading of my blog to reflect my new direction.

Oh yes and also I noticed the people I originally hosted my tutorial content have deleted it so im gonna hunt around for the original and re-post it on my skydrive.

Anywayz laterz.

First Video blog

2009-04-18T22:56:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Sorry for not posting much recently, been really busy with work and really thinking hard about future study. Anyway I've started to think about doing video tutorials, so I've signed up for youtube and done a really basic proof on concept (read rubbish) type video. This just shows you how to create an MX record. at the moment its just my actions with a bit of text and some music in the background (a very rough version of a song I wrote in a band a few years ago).

For any of you that may be interested I used camstudio to record the desktop (GPL software) and then windows movie maker to split it and add the audio and titles. Anyway here you go.

Free E-book from MS

2009-04-16T08:29:00.000+01:00

Microsoft is celebrating 25 years of MS Press Books and is offering a free e-book.

Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator’s Companion
By Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford
ISBN: 9780735620704

Microsoft Press - Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator&rsqou;s Companion

PC gaming is dead!

2009-04-02T20:29:00.001+01:00

Well for me that is. I've come to a bit of a cross roads. Now I've completed my MCSA I am thinking of kicking back a bit and playing some games. Now my main pc is used vary rarely these days so its spec is SOOOoo last century. Its an aging AMD 64 x2 3800 socket 939 with 2 GB and DDR and an ATI x800xt (or xl I forget now)graphics card. Which as I'm sure you can appreciate is not going to cut the mustard today. Its fine for all my old games like doom 3 and COD2 and F.E.A.R. with a bit of battlefield thrown into the mix, but any game I buy today with either look horrible or run at like 10FPS or something.

So the dilemma I have is: do I upgrade my computer (which realistically means ripping out everything and starting again) or do I buy a console of some sort.

I do want a WII that I know cause I like some of the games on it (TBH i'd be happy with the bowling game that comes with it) but I can imagine that I will still want to play a good few FPS's when I get the chance so I'm thinking also an xbox 360. This would also have the added bonus of being with the other half during gaming sessions and not skulking off to the south wing of the house and shying away from being sociable.

Add the fact that I'm a 30 something father with precious little time to play games too often I can see the pick up and play ability of consoles will be very appealing. Its just occurred to me that I'm writing this as if I've never owned a console before that's certainly not true my first console was an N64 and I still have one kicking around the house somewhere.

So its with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to PC gaming , its been fun (especially when installing new shiny gpu's memory or whatever and seeing what difference its makes to old games) and hello to the quicker satisfaction of console gaming.

More Free Tools

2009-03-27T23:02:00.004Z

Launchy

This tool originally I had a bit of trouble finding a use for but the more I used it the better I thought it was. This is basically a dialogue box that pops up when you press alt-space and you tap in the name of the application you want to launch and it will start. Now normally you would think that the vista search bar would be the same thing but launchy is quicker and seems to find alot more of your applications than the search bar does, and obviously in XP you don't have that option anyway.

Lansurveyor Express Limited Free Edition

Well this is not normally free but solarwinds the people behind lansurveyor have opted to give away its express version absolutely free for a limited time only. This scans and creates a visio document of your live network. So its a great quick way of actually creating a network map which should save a good few hours of messing about with visio. Normally this tool retails for $499 so even if you don't think you need it now I would urge you to get it because one day you will be asked for a network layout. CLICK ME for a quick demo of lansurveyor

Next Steps

2009-03-27T22:14:00.001Z

Well, I've managed to get SQL enterprise edition installed on a server and also citrix xenapp installed on another. At the moment the install on both were a bit more of a bodge than I'd like but obviously as I learn more then I'll rip them down and do a couple of reinstalls to home the skills. As I say I've never really used sql much so whilst I've installed the server and also the tools I've no idea what to do with it. Which is kinda cool in a way because it means I'm going to be learning something totally new to me.

Hooray

2009-03-22T21:39:00.001Z

Well that's it then, on my second try I passed the 291 exam with 842, much improved score than my first 641 so now I'm a a fully paid up MCSA. So at the moment I'm a very happy man and am busy updating all the people that need to know, the welcome kit has also already been ordered so should get that through in a few weeks.

Now I shall have a few weeks rest before embarking on any more studying, but I already have the books for the next exams. I have ordered Citrix xenapp book as I am really interested in learning more about citrix (and also becoming a CCA) and also I have ordered a book on SQL 2005 (exam 70-431) which is another technology I am interested in. Both exams will benefit my employer as both products are used and whilst I administer a couple of Citrix farms I know very little about sql so I thought this exam will ease me in nicely and will also be my elective sorted for the MCSE if I decide to go the whole hog (as we are a Novell shop then at the moment there is no point).

So where does this leave the blog, well I think it will probably have to be updated to show what I am studying at the time so you will see plenty of posts on sql server and Citrix Xenapp, but please still feel free to pop by if something is pepping your interest.

So now I'm re-thinking my lab and I'll already removed my rras servers as I wont be needing those for a while and I'll have to create a couple of new servers to house sql databases and citrix applications. So once I have my lab sorted I'll post a new network diagram.

www.dales-diary.co.uk

2009-03-10T17:40:00.000Z

Hi all,

Just a quick post to say that in a few days the blog will have a new domain name. www.dales-diary.co.uk. The host will not change so you will still be able to access the blog from www.dales-diary.blogspot.com but you will be presented with a redirect message (accept that and you will still have normal access). So if im lucky enough to A have any regular readers at all and B you are subscribing through an RSS reader then you may need to update the reader to point to the new domain.

Security Templates

2009-03-09T21:18:00.000Z

Hi all, thought I would do a quick blog with a basic run down of the names and functions of the security templates that are available by default in windows server 2003. I'll post a bit more on their usage when I've actually read about them.

COMPATWS	This template amends file and registry security permissions to assist older applications to run.
DCSECURITY	This applies the default security setting for a domain controller.
HISECDC	This template secures a domain controller by increasing NTLM security and disabling additional services and applying more stringent registry and file permissions. It also removes all members of the power users group on the domain controller. This template is more secure than the securedc template.
HISECWS	This as the name implies is very similar to the hisecdc but it also limits members of the local admins to the domain admins accounts and the local administrator.
LESACLS	This template changes registry key permissions that are part of Internet Explorer to everyone full control.
ROOTSEC	Applies root permissions to a system drive.
SECUREDC	This template limits account policies and only allows NTLMv2 and Kerberos to be used for logons.
SECUREWS	This template applies the same restrictions as the securedc except of course its applied to a workstation.
SETUP SECURITY	This template sets security permissions the same as when the operating system was first installed.
DEFLTSV	This applies the default server template used during its installation.
DEFLTDC	This applies the default domain controller template used during a dcpromo.

Network Security

2009-03-09T20:57:00.001Z

I've now finished reading up on DNS in my MSPress book, hopefully that will be enough to do me well on the big day, so i am now on network security which is another area that I got around the 50-60% mark in my first attempt. So you may see a few security related posts going up shortly. I'm just about to write one listing the security templates and their usage so that will be making an appearance soon.

Hmailserver

2009-03-03T19:11:00.001Z

Well, I've been very surprised by this little product. Its fantastic at the moment I'm only using it internally to email event logs and stuff to specific address but it works brilliantly. Also it works great with clamwin AV and also can be integrated with opensource webmail providers like squirrelmail. Also you can add spam filters to it by similar means.

Its so easy to set up and get this the install file is only 2.8MB. It requires the .net framework to be installed as a dependency but it really is a great little server app and if I ever become a sys admin for a small cash strapped company I would seriously consider this as an option! Granted it probably cannot synch with BES or anything funky but for an email platform its perfectly adequate for the job.

Aging and Scavenging

2009-02-27T22:49:00.002Z

Hi all,

I've just written up a quick tutorial on aging and scavenging, its only really a scrappy quick one but as usual please feel free to download it, and tell me what you think.

LINK

Secure Dynamic DNS updates

2009-02-27T17:30:00.001Z

So reading a bit more about DNS I’d thought I’d write a little about the secure DNS update feature.

When the Zone properties of an Active Directory Integrated zone is modified to allow secure updates Kerberos is used.
Things to keep in mind is that legacy clients cannot perform dynamic updates (think pre windows 2000 systems) in which case the dhcp server can be configured to update the dns records for the legacy client.

Good things about secure updates.

Because it uses the Kerberos protocol you can be sure that the client has authenticated to the domain and has a valid computer account (have a look at my Kerberos tutorial for more info).

So that’s the good stuff, now consider that because Kerberos is used to authenticate the client. Consider a win98 box. This cannot perform dynamic updates of any kind so a DHCP server can register the DNS records for it (if configured to do so). Because Kerberos is used to authenticate the originating client the DHCP server then becomes the owner of that record. Now a slight issue arises from a good idea. Owners of a record are the only clients that can update the resource record in DNS (from an automagical system point of view).

Now consider that the Windows 98 box is upgraded to windows XP (unlikely I know because of the probable age of the hardware but still worth knowing for the exam). Now the upgraded Windows XP box can perform its own dynamic updates. So XP boots and attempts to update its DNS record and….. its fails. Because the “OWNER” of the DNS record is the DHCP server that used to handle updates for it when it was a windows 98 OS. In that instance someone would have to manually delete the record and either recreate it correctly or reboot/renew etc the client pc so it attempts to update DNS again.

This can be resolved by adding systems to a group called DNSUpdateProxy, which stops the owner information being sent when the client/dhcp server attempts to perform a DNS update.

Also worth a thought is what happens if you have a network with one DHCP server/200 win XP boxes and 50 win 98 boxes. Friday evening (it always happens on a Friday) your dhcp server explodes magnificently, and you receive a phone call just after you’ve popped the lid on your favourite beer.
So you drag yourself back to work commission another server as a dhcp server reconfigure the scopes and then go home for whats left of your weekend.

Eventually you will notice that all of the win 98 boxes are not getting their records updated because all those records were owned by the DHCP server which is now being used as your deskside cupholder. So you will have to manually delete all those DNS records and get the DHCP server to attempt to re-register the DNS records for the clients. This can be avoided if you use the DNSUpdateProxy group. Because DNS will not know who the owner of the record was only that it was authenticated by Kerberos.

Excellent Open Source Applications

2009-02-26T19:21:00.001Z

Hi all,

Just a real quick post pointing you to two really cool OSS applications.

One is called Spiceworks and it enables you to scan your network and create an inventory of all devices found without days and days of mapping and writing from scratch. Also it has a built in helpdesk system. So for a small company or limited budget you could use this as your helpdesk and basic change management system. At the very least I would advise you lot to download it and get it to scan your network. Its brill!

SPICELINK

Also is an opensource email server I have found called hmailserver. Whilst I have not deployed it yet (too busy geeking over my 291 books). I would really like to get this up and running and put it through its paces. It includes a webmail subsystem as well as access from your favourite smtp/pop client. I would love to get this up and running at the same time as my exchange box and compare the two.

HmailLink

DNS basics

2009-02-22T22:52:00.001Z

Hi all, This post is just a quickie about the locations that you can use to store your DNS zone data, both standard and active directory integrated.

Standard Zones

Standard zones have all their information stored in text files on a DNS server. With standard zones you can only one primary copy of the database. Standard zones are also prone to failure as if the server hosting the primary zone fails then no updates/additions can be made to the zones which in a large domain/network with ddns enabled can quickly become a problem. The text files are generally named after the zone with .dns at the end for example a secondary zone for scrivnet.local would have its data saved on \system32\dns\scrivnet.local.dns . You can obviously use a normal text editor to view the contents of the files.

Active Directory Integrated Zones

Active Directory integrated zones do exactly what it says on the tin except with the added advantage that in this configuration you can have multiple servers with primary copies of the same zone data. The main thing to remember with this is that all the dns servers need to be domain controllers as well otherwise you cannot use integrated zones. Also secondary zones can never be integrated into active directory and can only be standard zones as above. Stub zones however can be integrated if you wish.

291 round one

2009-02-20T21:18:00.001Z

Well I took a shot at the 291 on Thursday and failed it (641 if your interested). To be honest I was quite pleased with the score I got and didn't expect to pass it anyway. I really just wanted to have a good idea of what I need to work on. Not only is this exam called the beast for a reason its not helping that we don't use any of this stuff at work so I can only go by my lab.

Whilst the exam is called the beast for a good reason, its not as bad as it seems, anyway now I've got myself a nice little chart one what subjects I need to work on and I'll give it another go again in a month. Hopefully next time I'll be walking out with my MCSA.

Novell username variable

2009-02-12T22:41:00.001Z

Hi all,

just a quick blog about a variable I discovered whilst writing a login script. I've been looking around for ways to perform actions based on the user name. So I came across the %nwusername% variable which when tapped in gives you the name of the logged in novell user on a computer. Those of you who work with novell systems will know that the novell network user is separate from the workstation user so normally you get a login for the network then you are presented with the local user login as well.Which will give you a problem if you use the %username% variable as it will only tell you the workstation user and not the novell user.

Anyway I'll blog again shortly and post up the script I'm working on, nothing fantastic but I think it would be good if I can get it to work with blat so the script emails me when it has been run inside a user account.

variable %nwusername%

Blat Link

Kerberos Tutorial

2009-02-11T22:34:00.002Z

HI all,

I've just been writing a few notes for myself again so I thought I'd put them up for you to have a look at. The notes are on the Kerberos authentication process that takes place when a computer and or user logs onto the system.

As always please feel free to comment.

LINKY

Common ports for the 70-291 exam

2009-02-10T17:30:00.003Z

Hi all,
Thought I would do a quick post about common ports for the 291 exams, these ones would be very useful to memorize in case questions come up about them in the exam, (ip filtering etc I suppose may ask about them).

So here’s a small list of ports, I’m sure I will add to them as I read through my books, All ports are TCP unless otherwise specified.

FTP 20 and 21
HTTP 80
HTTPS 443
DNS UDP 53
SMTP 25
POP3 110
PPTP 1723
L2TP UDP 500 + 1701 + 4500
Kerberos UDP 88

As you can see a lot of these ports you should already know from previous ms exams (client ones) so there’s not much else to memorize. But this may be a good starting point.

I would highly recommend creating your own list and printing them out and sticking them up in your office prior to taking the exam as it’s a great way of memorizing them (I used to do the same with min and recommended sys specs for the client and server exams).

TTFN

2009-02-01T22:03:00.002Z

Well again I think im going a little off topic on this one but just wanted to mention a few freebies that have really helped me in one way or the other.

Firstly I suppose I cant go very far without talking about DSL (damn small Linux) this a great lite operating system which I have loaded on a very old laptop at work with a decent battery (XP chugged like nobodies business on it). It now boots in a real quick time and gives me access to everything I need for configuring switches, routers, modem routers and the like. because the laptop is old it has a com port built into it (which is quickly disappearing on more recent ones). It would also be a good general OS for a creaky old PC that you just need for general surfing and document creation. Details can be found here.

Another great freebie is clamwin anti virus. This is originally a linux anti virus package but has also been ported onto windows, it provides a very stable and reliable anti virus solution that works on all versions of windows from 2000 upwards (really good for a test lab environment).

Another great thing I have found is a site called quidco, which is basically a cashback site. It has a ton of online shops on it and for the sake of clicking through a link to the site from quidco even if its only a few pennies you might as well earn the cash back. Quite often the offers are reasonably generous, for example I bought a item from crucial with about a £25 value, and I got £1.50 back from that.

DHCP Relay Agent

2009-02-01T20:08:00.002Z

Hi all,

Just thought I'd write a quick little ditty about the DHCP relay agent and some fun and games I've been having with it whilst studying.

My main network is 192.168.1.x/24, on it is my DC/DNS/DHCP server with a few other bits and bobs plus my ADSL modem/router. on that network is a server called "rras" who has 2 nics, one is 192.168.1.42 and the other is 172.16.10.2/16 which is connected to another virtual switch. the only thing connecting the 2 networks is the rras box. on the 172.16 side is one client PC. rras has been set up on the server and also the DHCP relay agent has been added to the 172.16 card and pointed to my DHCP server of 192.168.1.8 .
The DHCP server has 2 scopes for both subnet's all working fine. my ADSL modem/router also has a static route added to direct traffic bound for 172.16 to the 192.168.1.42 card. The "RRAS" server has also been added to the "rras and ias" group in Active directory.

Now the thing that has been bugging me is that the client PC has not been picking up any IP addresses. When I ran network monitor on both network cards of the rras server I saw discover packets being sent by the client, and I saw them popping out the other side of my network and I also sensibly enough saw offer packets being sent back to the 192.168 card on rras. What I wasn't seeing is the offer packets popping out on the 172.16 subnet so that the DHCP process could continue.

This was really weird and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working then all of a sudden it seemed to kick in and started working. I couldn't tell you why it suddenly started working other than I added the 172.16 scope to the DHCP server about an hour previous so I don't know whether there is naturally a delay in the relay agent working with the DHCP server.

The other thing that I found abit annoying in all my study material (3 books, mspress,exam cram and sybex) is that they don't say specifically which network card you should add the DHCP relay agent too. I assumed that it would need to go on the card attached to the subnet without a DHCP server but it was not specified. So whilst I was having this trouble I was wondering if I needed to add the relay agent to both cards!? Luckily it started working before I had tried that out.

encryption Protocols

2009-01-20T17:29:00.002Z

Just spotted this on the technet website which gives you a good brief summery of the encryption protocols which can be used with remote access (rras).

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738300.aspx

DNS SOA Tab Tutorial

2009-01-15T22:22:00.002Z

Hi all,

I did promise a 291 relevant posting next and here it is, its just a quick explaination of the options on the SOA tab on a zones properties.

LINKY TO FILE

Gadgets Galore

2009-01-14T20:58:00.001Z

Hi all,

Again apologies for not posting more but with new baby in the house things have been rather busy however I do intend to post some more now as baby number 2 now goes to bed at the same time as baby number 1. So we actually have time to do things in the evening.

My 291 exam has now been booked for the end of Feb in an attempt to make me get a move on with studying. I'm mostly expecting to fail it but with the aid of the second shot I can take the exam again for free, which means I'll treat the first go as a yard stick for what I need to study and how far out I am.

Also I have fallen in love with my freebie mp3 player again, I got it ages ago for renew my BT broadband line for another 12 months (im sure im paying over the odds but whilst studying for my MCSA I need a good reliable line). Its only a 2GB one so cant hold too much and at the moment I cannot really justify shelling out for an Ipod or something with alot more space. The mp3 player I was given is a Creative Zen Stone Plus its a tiny device which is a big plus and also has decent sound quality (it should do being creative). UP until now I've used the music player on my k800i mobile but that is basic to say the least. Anyway with the stone you can browse the albums (as long as they are in folders on the player) and it will begin playing the album imediately. Im sure that its nowhere near as good as an Ipod but it will do me for now.

Also I have bought from a well known auction site a Belkin tunecast II FM transmitter. Which simply plugs into the headphone socket of your Ipod/mp3 player and you can then tune your home/car radio into its frequency and you have your mp3's on your radio, good for parties or rocking out in the car if you dont have an usb socket in your stereo. I've never bothered looking into these types of devices before because I thought that they would be expensive but I got the belkin for £8 and I hear it retails in the shops for around £15, so it was worth a punt to see what it was like. I must say again I am very impressed with it sound quality is excellent and you can choose any frequency to transmit on. Also the device automatically turns itself on/off when you begin playing music from your mp3 player or when no music is being played for a period of 60 seconds.

Anyway next post will definitely be useful to any 291ers out there.

TTFN.

nearly xmas now

2008-12-22T17:00:00.001Z

Hi all,

Some of you may have noticed that the blog has changed colour a couple of times, just because I fancied a change but now I'm reverting to black simple and it looks great.

Anyway I’ve been slowly reading my books and getting a bit frustrated in the amount of time I have in the evenings to play with my labs but I think I am getting there eventually. I’ll have to try and hide away for an evening and take a measureup test to see how I’m doing.

I’ve recently added another domain to my esxi box which at the moment for experimental purposes has zone transfers set up so dns can work between domains.

I’ll have to draw another network diag soon and post up but at the moment my network looks like this.

Scrivnet has one DC battlestar and a wsus server called adama plus 2 clients (both xp), ScrivCorp has one DC called cylon and at the moment is the only server/client in the domain (but still it allows me to toy with dns a little).

So my battlestar galactica naming convention is still in existence and as a side note I hope you are watching the webisodes in the lead up to the new series early next year!

Anyway I’ll sign off for a bit but I will try to write some decent tutorials soon for you.

Email as an Archive

2008-12-01T17:30:00.001Z

Hi all,

Yet again studying is coming on rather slowly, although I have tested myself with the measureup product and am rather pleased with the result.

One thing I wanted to post about which I believe is a very valid point but not practiced in any other company I have worked for is using an email system for storage.

Now up until joining my current employer well over a year ago storing items in the email system just happened and I didn’t think about it much. Now though I have come round to my employers way of thinking that an email system should NOT be used as a storage facility. If you think about it it makes perfect sense especially for those of you using exchange and outlook.

Email was designed as a messaging facility and nothing more, think of all those personal folders tucked away with data that nobody can get to very easily, when those attachments should really be saved to either the users personal drive or better still the teams shared workspace.

Now the main reason why I think that email systems should not be used as storage doesn’t actually apply our current mailsystem (Groupwise). I’ve never ever had this issue with groupwise whereas when supporting exchange and outlook experienced this problem several times a day.

Ring Ring… Hello IT..ah you cant get into your personal folder this morning, hold on let me check……

Now this is a very typical issue with outlook where for some reason (and I still have not found an exact size that a pst has to be before it does this), the PST folder has turned its toes. I’ve seen this in PST’s of about 300-400 megs and some lucky people have managed to get the file to a couple of gigs before the file suddenly give up the ghost. Now if this issue doesn’t scream don’t use email as a file store I don’t know what does.

As I say the way that Groupwise archives emails is different and I’ve never EVER had a call about an archive issue in groupwise.

Star Trek XI

2008-11-20T21:40:00.001Z

Heres a link to the 2nd trailer for the new star trek film, I very excited!

Absence etc

2008-11-11T22:19:00.001Z

Hi all,

Sorry for not posting for a while but there has been a small matter of a new baby and not much sleep in our household recently, so my studying has taken a back step for a couple of weeks. But im back to it now and feeling much better for my break.

A while ago I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the 291 and really felt that I wasn't getting anywhere with the studying, but now I've started again that appears to be disappearing. I have read the whole chapter on dhcp in my sybex book today (time for reading whole chapters of books in my house is a remarkable event) and I feel better for it.

I think that the 291 is totally different to the other MS exams I've taken in that a different studying method is required for it. But you just have to naturally find your own way of studying.

Anyway now im all dhcp'd up and my esxi server appears to be behaving itself now I can get down to some serious studying and tutorial writing. see you soon.

Firefox Extentions

2008-10-20T17:30:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

Just thought I'd point out a couple of firefox addons that I have found useful. Firstly Colourfultabs does what it says on the tin, it taints each tab a different colour. But dont worry they are not flashing eye inducing colours but just different enough to help you with telling which one is which.

The other is adblocker plus, this allows you to right click on a pesky banner add and hide it from view, so untidy looking forums and other such sites can be cleaned up very quickly.

Now to buy a ton more memory for my server install openfiler and continue with my 291!

New toys

2008-10-18T21:48:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Just thought i'd let you know of a purchase I made this week. I splashed out and bought myself a dell poweredge sc440. I bought the server with pretty much the bog standard spec, no SAS controller just normal SATA 1gig of memory and a 2.1 dual core xeon processor. Total cost was about £250 quid.

I know that a 1 gig isnt much memory but I'd thought I'd prove that it works before splashing out on more. I'm pleased to say that vmware ESXI works a treat on it without any fiddling around, you dont need any fancy SAS controllers or posh network cards it all works straight out of the box.

I've already transferred one of my DC's into ESXI so I'll get some more memory and virtualise as much as I can from my games machine.

Citrix XenApp Developer edition

2008-10-14T21:49:00.001+01:00

For those of you who may not know, Im quite keen on getting a CCA under my belt after finishing my MCSA, even more interestingly did you know you can get a free 2 user download of citrix's presentation server. All you need to do is create an account on the main citrix site and then after logging in and going to the downloads section choosing xenapp developer edition. Cool huh! time for some superTS fun at my house.

ESXI Servers

2008-10-14T21:47:00.001+01:00

Well I have been looking around the net the last few days for cheap servers that support vmware esxi and have slowly been coming up with options. The most appropriate at the moment are the dell poweredge sc440 and the fujitsu-siemens econel 100 which according to vmwares HCL are compatible with esxi out of the box. All of the options are under 300 pounds but dell are a little off putting with their £60 delivery charge. There is also the poweredge t105 which is a posibility but I currently have requested some more info from my dell contact if this is compatible. I am also finding this information is useful for work as they would like me to run a few virtulisation tests on some of our live servers so that will be a interesting little project for me!

Vm ware server esxi

2008-10-10T13:00:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

I thought I'd do a quick post about esxi which as you probably know is the free version of the vmware hypervisor.

I thought I'd give it a go and see what it was like. Firstly I knocked up a spare machine at work to try it out on, I burned the esxi disk and plumbed it into the machine (a fairly standard dell gx520 if your wondering). The installation quite literally took about 2 minutes to install the hypervisor. I pointed my main pc's browser at the hypervisors ip and there you get the option to download and install the infrastructure client.

Once you have downloaded the client you can use that to manage the esxi sever, do things like create new vm's view them in a console and a ton of other stuff. Let's just say I am now completely converted to esxi. For a freebie its a fantastic programme and vmware also provide other great tools too. For example I downloaded the converter tool (again free) and have so far converted a opensuse vm and my physical secondary domain controller (without any downtime).

I had an inkling of how good vmware esx was cause we use it on our branch office at work, but this is fantastic and it just reaffirms to me that anyone in it should be grabbing virtualisation exposure where ever they can.

The most obvious and normally major business point for virtualisation is cutting costs, less physical servers required, less cost on bare metal, aircon and electricity and datacentre space. But there are other bonuses too which include the ability to store template servers, so your boss walks in and says right we need 5 windows server for appx how long will it take to build them and to get them live. Err about an hour you say. Boss wonders off thinking great this will make us look fab as you don't need to buy 5x servers at 2 grand a pop and you feel good as you don't have to unpack and install 5 weighty servers. There are tons of other reasons why to virtulise but I'm going back to my desk to play with esxi.

Tata.
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MBCS,MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor, ITIL V3 F)

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless Device

Quiet moments

2008-10-08T13:04:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Sorry I've been a bit quiet on the blog front recently been rather busy with one thing or another. I have been studying and taking notes so expect another tutorial type post in the next few day or so. Most of the stuff I've been revising recently is routing, dhcp a bit of dns and a cursory glance at ipsec.

At the moment work appears to be very relevant to the 291, I'm sure we all get days when somebody asks you a question about something you read about the night before. I seem to be getting quite a lot recently!

See ya soon
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MBCS,MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor, ITIL V3 F)

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless Device

Lolcats!

2008-09-26T09:08:00.000+01:00

more animals

Tropical User

2008-09-25T17:32:00.001+01:00

Just thought I'd share part of my day with you. I get a call from a user saying "I cant access my files" fair enough can you try logging in again says I cause zenworks isnt showing you as logged on. Tree or server not found says she. Doh, this means I've got to get out of my chair to go and investigate.

Get into the office and its boiling hot in there, suspecting that they have yanked out the network cable I reseat it at both ends, nope still no connectivity. Right hands and knees job to change the cable then..... eeerrrr hang on whats this, its kicking out heat on par with the sun.... and its sitting directly ontop of the network cable. Moving the cable produces some colourful language as the damn thing has melted and nearly took my thumb off.

They thought I was joking when I said they had melted the cable until I showed them the sticky remains of the middle of the cable!!!!

Ooo!

2008-09-11T23:10:00.001+01:00

What was that, just a faint whisper in the wind, something about we might be moving over to exchange at work from groupwise. Right time to dust off the exchange books just in case!

DNS Properties Tab

2008-09-10T21:41:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Heres a quick paper I put together on the DNS properties page within the DNS mmc. There is alot of options to consider on this particular properties page most of which can in day to day events be left well alone and only require tinkering either when DNS changes on your network or you are setting up a new domain.

LINKY

DNS Forwarding Tutorial

2008-09-03T22:04:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

I've been studying dns for a while now and feel quite comfortable with writing a couple of tutorials. Heres one about dns forwarders. I'll write another one or two shortly.

Linky

Google Chrome

2008-09-03T14:29:00.001+01:00

Google Chrome

Well google chrome went available for download last night, for any of you not in the loop its a new open source browser which is been released by google. I downloaded it and took it for a test drive round the internet.

I must say I found the experience rather Ho-hum. I'm not a big fan of the cartoony look it's been given and I did expect it to integrate with other google services in one way or another but they do not.

The look is quite minimalist with only tabs and an address bar on first load. Google seem to be making a big thing of its thumbnail site browsing however this is nothing new as the Opera browser has been doing this for a number of years(opera call this feature speed dial browsing I think).

They also have a incognito mode which when launched does not store any temp files of cache any history (make of that feature what you will), again safari has been there and done that already.

The only good thing I can make out from the browser it that each tab runs in its own process, so if a site makes a tab go all wonky you can quit that tab and it wont affecting any other browsing on the other tabs.

Sites dont seem to load any quicker to me in fact one of my favourite sites certforums.co.uk seemed a bit slower than normal to render.

I've heard people mention that chrome takes less resources to run than the other main browsers but really this is a bit of a moot point when these days I can run several virtual machines on a vista host box and still do documents and web browsing at the same time. A few years ago computer resources were things you needed to conserve and look after but that no longer really applies.

Overall its another browser you could install if you want to, but its not going to make me move away from my Internet Explorer and firefox browsers.

It Works

2008-09-02T20:25:00.001+01:00

Well I stuck my new drive back in my machine and the drive is working perfectly! The tool obviously worked a treat so if you have similar trouble give it a whirl.

Hard drive fun

2008-09-02T17:00:00.000+01:00

Well I bought myself a nice shiny samsung hd502ij 500gb hard disk to move a virtual server or two onto (the wsus content is really chewing up the disk space). Stuck the drive in my computer and switched her on........ Nothing, didnt recognise the new disk at all. It turns out that there is a compatibility problem with older via chipsets (my motherboard currently only supports sata 150. but there is a tool you can download called estool you can download an image for floppy or cd rom. Amongst the things you can do with it is force a sata drive to operate at 150 and not the default 300 of modern drives.

I have not actually put the drive back into my pc yet to see if it works but this little bit of info may be of help to some of you. Obviously if I decide in the future to buy a new motherboard then I will need to set it back to full speed. Of course the other option is to get a pci sata card and use it on that.

I'll let you know later how I get on.

More great Utilities

2008-09-01T14:06:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Just another quick post about another couple of really useful utilities I've found, one is quite old and I've known about it for some time but never actually used it until now.

Keypass Password Safe
I've just added this application to my portable apps pen drive, Its an application that you can insert all your websites usernames and passwords to so you dont have to remember loads of different passwords for them. The main concern is obviously security but the application itself is protected with a Master password so you only ever have to remember one password to gain access to all your others.

Where this application comes into its own is its ability to generate random passwords for you for registering with new sites. This means you can have very complicated passwords for sites and never have to actually remember them just copy and paste the generated password into the sites sign up form and you can have a different secure as you like password for each site you register with.

Once you have the passwords and site details in the application you can open the website from the application then select perform autotype to enter your login details for you. Absolutely brilliant!!!

download it here

Ccleaner

Ccleaner is an old tool that probably most of you will already know about, I came to use eit when a work colleague bought a laptop in for me to look at. It had got that spyware/av product called advanced antivirus which mascarades itself as a full blown antivirus suit. After wrestling with its removal and associated other spyware and AV issues, (laptop had norton on but subscription had expired in 2003, so was in essence not protected). I put clamwin on it to take care of AV duties in the future and started looking around for a freebie reg cleaner. During the removal of all the problems it had left a few registry issues and startup items that were no longer there so on boot you'd get a few errors pointing to missing files etc. I downloaded Ccleaner and installed it and must say I was very impressed with it. It scans the registry for problems very quickly (it took under 10 seconds to run on this laptop which was great considering how slow and bogged down with rubbish it was). Once it has found the problem entries when you run the delete button it gives you the option to backup the registry enteries its going to delete, which I did. It deletes th entries just as quickly. So just for good measure I rebooted and ran ccleaner a couple more times which picked up the odd straggling issue here and there. After a total of 3 scans with ccleaner I was getting no more issues with missing files or odd things trying to run in the back ground.

Download it here

So another tool has gone onto my pen drive for future use!

Notepad++

2008-08-19T22:26:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Just a quick post tonight about another useful tool I've found called notepad++, as the name implies its pretty much an extended notepad, which we as sysadmins use for creating scripts/bat files etc. Except this one is blimin brilliant, it allows you to view code in a much more structured way and it also automatically shows line numbers which is also a godsend. It does tons of other stuff too check it out!

Linky

My Current Domain Network

2008-08-14T13:57:00.005+01:00

Hi All,

I thought that it might be a good idea to show you my current domain diagram for my 291. At the moment as you know I have a domain and a child domain, both have a wsus server the child domain wsus is a downstream server. This network will at the moment be used to study DNS,DHCP and wsus. I've bought a dell powerconnect 3024 switch from ebay for £20 which I will set up some vlans on it to experiment with routing and relays etc.

Heres the linky for my network

have a look at the powerconnect tags for links to my other posts about the switch.

If you are interested I used an open source program call "dia" to create the diagram, I know the images etc are not very polished but it gets the point across

Studying out the window

2008-08-14T12:25:00.001+01:00

Ok, so I didn't really study too much last night as I spent most of the evening trying to figure out why a workstation which had a perfectly good wsus gpo applied to it was not "calling in" to its wsus server.

The workstation had no previous object in wsus so it should have created a new account and allow me to move the account to the right container. It also had sp2 installed with the wsus compatible client software installed so no issues there.

In the end I went to windowsupdate.com on the client machine, installed one update a rebooted. About 10 minutes later it reported into wsus. Still not entirely sure why it did this but its working now. It also taught me a bit more about wsus with all that poking around in the file system I did to try and figure it out. Perhaps I'll furnish this post with a couple of pictures later.

TTFN
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MBCS,MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor, ITIL V3 F)

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless Device

Proper Studying tonight.

2008-08-13T17:30:00.000+01:00

Right Then,

I've decided that I shall do some proper DNS studying and writing a few tutorials on them which I find is a good way for the stuff to stick with me. see you in a few hours!

More useful utils

2008-08-12T09:00:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Just another quick post about a site I found called roadkil.net, which has lots and lots of usfeful utilities on it all free of charge. Catagories range from calculators to diagnostics and from networking to security. Certainly worth a goosey gander.

LINK

General Mutterings

2008-08-11T22:12:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Just a quick grumble, I've got about 2 months to go on my mobile contract so I've started looking around to see what I can upgrade to when my contracts due, However it seems that my supplier dont do 12 month contracts anymore its only 18 or 24 month contracts, I ask you who wants a phone for 18 months at the least!

I've got a blackberry at the moment but due to change in circs (work gave me one) I dont really use the email on it too much apart from the odd blog or two, So I was thinking of going back to a standard phone and saving myself a few coffers.

My supplier do however offer a sim only deal which for either 20 or 25 quid you can get either 200mins and 200 txts a month or 600 mins and unlimited txts a month so i'll probably go for one of those and just fork out for a handset which will still end up cheaper than an proper contract and I can change my phone as much as I like and end my agreement with the provider with just 30 days notice at any point.

Comment spam

2008-08-11T12:33:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

I've got a few blogs lined up for you but thought I would make it clear that the comments on this blog are moderated for approval, so spam won't get through (you know the ones with links to sites selling you things).

I know this blog doesn't have the biggest readership in the world but I really hope that some of you gain from reading some of the posts.

Of course feel free to post comments but spammers will not get through.
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MBCS,MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor, ITIL V3 F)

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless Device

Dual Screen Wallpaper

2008-08-08T12:38:00.004+01:00

Hi all,

Just thought that I really much blog about this really cool little app I've found called displayfusion. It allows you to have 2 different wallpapers across your dual screen monitors. the app works fine on my xp pro box, have not tested it on vista yet but I presume the same could be said for that.

I will also allow you to streach 1 picture across the 2 monitors as well. Its a bit of a dull day at work so this was quite an exciting find for me!

OpenDNS

2008-08-06T22:05:00.001+01:00

Hello again, just thought I'd post about this little utility I came across, openDNS is a web site that hosts DNS servers. The beauty of this is that you can point your computers or router to the opendns server and you have an imediate surf control type affair on your network. openDNS by default blocks many adult sites and phishing sites so if you dont want anyone on your network looking at naughty things then this is the free way to do it. You can also sign up with them which will give you even more control over your DNS quieries. There default free DNS servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 or you can go to opendns.com for more details!

Child domain now working

2008-08-06T21:29:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Just a little update to say i've got the child domain working now, what was wrong was the fact that the child domains DC isnt a new fresh install and infact had just been dcpromo'd to a DC. As the dns server was set as the DC of scrivnet.co.uk then this ment there was some hooky host (A) records still around after the promotion, so once I had deleted those records and performed an "ipconfig /registerdns" on the new child DC all was well again.

in fact now im installing WSUS 3 sp1 onto the child dc with the intention of making it act as a downstream server so it gets all its updates from my scrivnet.co.uk DC. I shall update you on that soonest. I'll post something useful in a bit.

Child domains

2008-08-01T12:54:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Last night I tried setting up a child domain called sales.scrivnet.co.uk didn't exactly go as planned. I expected to see a new zone auto magically set up for me in my original scrivnet dc pointing to the new sales dc. But that didn't seem to work, so I created a new zone on my scrivnet dc and pointed it to the new sales dc.

One other odd thing is that I thought it might set up dns on the sales dc as well but it didn't, but then when I noticed that it didn't I assumed it would use the scrivnet dc\dns server but it didn't seem to do that either.

I suspect I've fubarred something up so I'll have another go tonight!
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MBCS,MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor, ITIL V3 F)

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless Device

skype and apache

2008-07-24T20:13:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Still studying DNS for my 291 and there is ALOT to learn, so when I actually have a decent grasp on the more advanced topics I shall write another couple of tutorials.

I thought I'd write a little about some other things I've been playing with, I've been having a think about using skype occasionally primarily for a mate of mine once we start chatting it can go on for quite some time. I've ordered myself an inexpensive headset to get started with was about £15 from ebuyer just so I can test the system out. I quite like the thought of free conference calls.

Today I've started playing with apache as well, I've tried a couple of different base distros but settled on ubuntu server, due to its low overhead and having apache2 installed by default during the set up. I think that its quite an important thing to learn because even in an Active Directory environment there is a good chance that at least one web server will be hosted on apache due to their robust nature both security and uptime wise.

Think I might have posted this before but its worth another visit its hilarious LINK

CD/DVD burning software

2008-07-17T08:24:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Just a quick little review on some cd burning software I've been using for quite some time now, best of all its free. cdburner xp is a great little application that presents an interface to you the same as the other big names did 2 or three years ago. The interface is set out with an explorer view so you can drag and drop files to the cd burning area, you can also make and burn iso's which is great for the linux distros etc.

Check it out!

http://cdburnerxp.se/

Backup Moment

2008-07-10T20:52:00.001+01:00

Well I had some worrying few moments last night. My main studying pc orginally just had a 40g ide drive with xp home on it. When I added a Sata drive over a year ago I put vista ultimate on that. My pc has been crashing occasionally recently but I didnt think too much of it, but last night it failed and wouldnt boot. So luckily I found out it was the IDE drive which really doesnt get much use these days apart from games that I used to play on it, so its no great loss.

However my ide drive was the boot and system drive, so all of a sudden I had a perfectly working vista OS but with no where to boot from. which would have been a real pain if I had to reinstall vista again completely just to get the boot loader on there.

But after a bit of thinking I downloaded gparted found here which is a bootable linux distro that is completely designed for partition editing. So luckily I was able to mark the sata primary partition as a boot partition. Then a reboot into the vista dvd and going to the repair options and selecting repair startup problems soon got vista going again.

Before I used gparted the vista disk could not see the vista installation even though it had no problem browsing the entire disk, I am impressed with the repair options you get with vista bar the fact it relies on the bcd to tell it where the installations are.

Anyway situation averted and we have a happy and working pc again!

DNS tutorial

2008-07-06T21:22:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I've written a short tutorial on DNS resolution, its by no way complete yet as im still learning the subject so may have the odd error in it. However I have found a great little technet artile which the link is included in the document to explain the difference of iterative and recursive resolution.

DNS TUTORIAL

Vmware and other musings

2008-06-30T12:45:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I think I've been a little late joining the party of this one but I've just discovered what a great tool vmware server is. I installed it on my pc at work so I can play with opensuse 11. Historically I've always used virtual pc but feel so far that vmware is a better tool, and at the moment is running opensuse 11 perfectly which is something virtual pc can't. In fact I've never had any luck with any linux os with a gui on virtual pc. Whether that's an oddity or by design is anyone’s guess.

One thing you can do with vmware is run the server and host the virtual os's on one pc and run and view them from another with vmware player, think remote desktop.

So far I'm very impressed with opensuse 11 it seems a very capable os's and also has lots of server ability as well. I've only really got a fundamental understanding of linux I can only really set it up and use samba and that's about it.
I thought I'd better make an effort to learn about it as we have loads of linux servers and as they have the ability now to join a domain it really is a tech you can now not ignore.

I think that in an ad environment they would make a good cheap file and print server which would save about 200-300 quid plus a few cals depending on the access model you are going for.

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home

2008-06-27T21:58:00.001+01:00

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home

cool little os for turning a spare pc into a nas device.

BCS and late night working

2008-06-27T13:13:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Right I'm down to business now with studying the 291 and will make a concerted effort to learn it.... Just not today.

Last night I was working until about 1am at the local government elections. Can't say it was actually working too much as all I had to do was set up a small network with a server and be on hand in case it fell over. Then I had to take it all apart and bus it back to work that evening. I must say that watching the whole vote counting process was very interesting and of course being in camera shot of the media too.

So right now I think the lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me.

We are getting reasonably close to deploying vmware. My boss was quite keen on citirx's xen but that does not support netware which was a problem.

So I have been thinking that maybe a vmware cert if such a thing exists would be a good idea.

I've also applied for a professional membership to the bcs (british computer society) I've been accepted so just need to wait for the paperwork to see what that has to offer.

I'll write more over the weekend when I start to study.

Positive result from Certguard

2008-06-24T14:46:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I've just found out that this very blog has been given a positive result by certguard.

http://www.CertGuard.com/Search.asp?Site=dales-diary.blogspot.com

Again I apologies that lately there hasnt actually been that many technical and learning articles but as I said before bad stuff has been happening in my life. But I'll be back on track in the next week or two so will start posting some more info then.

Keep coming back and leaving comments, anything is appriciated.

Server quest

2008-06-24T13:12:00.001+01:00

Hi all,

Just thought I would draw your attention to an online microsoft game.

Its called server-quest and is all about a guy going about his day to day network admin role. Its fairly entertaining and if you think of games like day of the tentacle then you will know what it will look like.

Its obviously one massive bit of pr and propaganda on MS part but as I say it will while away a few minutes.
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor, ITIL V3 F)

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MS Technet Direct

2008-06-20T20:46:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I've just been busy renewing my subscription to technet direct and thought I would have a quick chat about it. Its a great way of getting your hands on pretty much every bit of MS software ever made. All the software is the are non time limited trial edtions, which effectively means they are full normal editions for a fraction of the price.

You pay about £160 plus vat per year for the subscription so its alot less than just one copy of vista ultimate personally I think its a real bargin especially if you are studying for exams as it allows you to play around with the relevant software with having to rely on work giving you a test lab or even worse playing with live servers etc.

You also get 2 telephone support calls to microsoft (the ones where you normally have to pay) and various other little goodies.

Linky to technet here

Itil v3

2008-06-19T12:14:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Just a quick post to say that I passed the itil v3 foundation. I don't know the score yet. But its another cert to band around.

Manual for Dell powerconnect 3024

2008-06-13T21:51:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

Sorry for the lack of of technical chat for the past 3 weeks or so but life has been rather rubbish towards me recently. But heres the manual for my new switch. It only cost me £20 from ebay and is a great bargin to help me study for the 291 and also to get used to other switches and not just the extreme network ones we use at work.

Linky

More new old toys

2008-06-13T19:01:00.001+01:00

My switch arrived today really impressed with the seller and looking forward to playing with it.
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor)

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Bored

2008-06-06T15:08:00.000+01:00

Whilst I'm sat here waiting for a users pc to image with a hard drive that sounds like its full of pebbles. I thought I'd write another blog entry.

I forgot to bring any study material to work today which is a pain except I've already copied the mspress ebook to my hard drive so I've been diving in and out of that during the day. I must say the mspress book seems to be holding my attention a lot better than the previous books. I've always wanted to like them as I think they are structured in a very helpful manner. Perhaps its just because I find the network infrastructure exam a lot more interesting.

When I get down to some real studying I shall write some more tutorials.

I'm also in the middle of bidding on some managed switches on ebay so I can test subnetting. I've currently changed my dhcp scope to include 192.168.1.0\26 so I have cut my subnets up into 3 chunks at the moment one section is the server scope one I've called village scope and one I've called town scope. My thinking behind this is that I can set up vlans ona number of the switches and depending on which computer is connected to a group of ports then it will be given an appropriate address.

I'm not entirely sure if this will work but that's what I'm learning for isn't it.
Kind Regards
Dale Scriven (MCDST,MCP,A+, DSE Assessor)

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MSPRESS 291 book

2008-06-05T19:14:00.001+01:00

HI all,

I have not written here for a bit or studied for a week or two because of some real bad stuff going on. But now im starting to think about studying again and to help me I have bought the MSPRESS 291 book. So far today I've read the first two chapters, nothing earth shattering yet but flicking further on in the book im really looking forward to it. More soon!

DHCP DORA

2008-05-22T20:03:00.002+01:00

Well I've been reading up on the DORA process for DHCP and have created a little tutorial on how clients get IP addresses in the first place. As normal comments and suggestions welcome.

CLICK HERE

No to all copying

2008-05-20T12:54:00.001+01:00

We've all been there copying a large amount of data from one place to the other and with only moments to go, the system hangs or gives you a funky error message. Now you have the choice of figuring out what has copied ok or copying it all again.

There is however an unwritten function in windows xp that makes the whole painfull process just a little bit easier, its called "no to all".

When you copy a large amount of files/folders and paste them into a destination that already has some of the content it will ask you if you want to overwrite the data. Your options will be YES, YES TO ALL, NO and CANCEL. But if you hold down the shift key and press no it will take that prompt as being NO TO ALL.

Try it out and see what you think.
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Check out what I found in my local canteen

2008-05-19T12:40:00.000+01:00

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May day festivities

2008-05-17T13:14:00.000+01:00

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70-291

2008-05-16T12:21:00.003+01:00

Well, I've got the sybex 291 book in front of me and am about to embark on learning enough to slay the beast. The initial chapter is all about the OSI model. I have studied this model before so am aware of it but I think it would be very beneficial if I go in to great depths on all the topics covered in the 291.

I may start my learning the model and then writing a tutorial about it to help me out.

Finished ITIL

2008-05-15T13:45:00.001+01:00

Well the course is out of the way which I'm pleased about. Overall I didn't like the course and it didn't cover what I thought it would. As mentioed before it was prodominately business speak so I had a real tough time figuring out what they ment and trying to keep interested.

I'm not sure how I did in the exam as there was a lot of guesswork in the answers. The 2nd mock exam I did I got 31 so hopefully that's a good sign, I should find out the real exam score in about a week or two.

Its a real shame about the course as I turned up on monday really keen and wanting to learn about it as I think ITIL has a lot to offer, but the fact it was shrouded in buzzwords made me finish the course not really minding if I passed or failed.

They really should do a techs version of ITIL which would layout the benefits in a way us techs would understand and not assume we all understand project manager speak.
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ITIL day two

2008-05-13T21:15:00.001+01:00

Well I've finished day two of my 3 day itil course, I must say its really hard going for me. We seem to be speeding through all of the content at a rate of knots and unfortunately I have always had a natural dislike for business speak so thats not helping.

I've done one mock exam which I scored 27 in (pass mark is 26), I've got one more mock exam tomorrow and then the real thing.

Itil course

2008-05-12T15:06:00.001+01:00

Well I'm on the first day of my itil course and its acronyms a-go-go.
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Yeeee haaaa

2008-05-09T13:46:00.000+01:00

Well today I took and passed the 290 exam with a score of 871. I'm really chuffed with the results as I was bricking it in the exam.

A few beers could be in order I think.

But there is no rest for the wicked as I have my itil foundation course on monday so will have to start reading the little book they gave me for that over the weekend. Plus I think I will have a go at the vista 70-620 next whilst doing a bit of studying for the 291.

System state and NTbackup

2008-05-08T20:25:00.001+01:00

When using NTbackup to backup the System state the following items are backed up:

A standard server backs up the systems registery and the com+class registration database. All the systems boot files (ntdetect.com ntldr etc), also system files that are protected by the windows file protection service.

If your server provides other roles such as a domain controller etc then the system state will also include the following:

Active directory directory service plus the sysvol folder on a domain controller.

Certificate services on a certificate server.

Cluster service information on a cluster server.

IIS metabase on a server hosting IIS.

Whilst you can remotely backup files and folders with ntbackup you cannot remotely backup the system state

More useful tidbits

2008-05-08T13:59:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

here's another little list of things you may find useful.

The Network interface\output queue length and Bytes total\sec counters in Performance logs and alerts should have a low queue length and a high Bytes total\sec. This means that there is alot of data going through without a great deal of delay.

commands

SCHTASKS allows you to view/create and modify schtasks on a local or remote computer. the basics for using the schtasks command are

SCHTASKS /QUERY this will display an output of all the scheduled tasks on the local machine, note that if you are just interested in the local machine then just typing "schtasks" will also output the same list.

To query a remote computer you will need the /s %computername% syntax for example "schtasks /query /s homedc". You can also combine the command with the /u "username" /p "password" to check the scheduled tasks running under a particular user account.

Schtasks can also use the /delete /change /run /end as well as /query, all these have similar sytaxes to /query. The /create however has alot of syntaxes that you will need to view if you want to create a tasks on a headless server with no remote desktop (for that I would suggest you perform a "schtasks /create /?" to view all the possible combinations.

Useful stuff to memorise

2008-05-07T21:35:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I have not taken the exam yet but it is getting fairly close so I've found it easiest in the past to memorise certain things shortly before the exam, things like minimum sys specs etc, as they tend to chuck in a question or two about it but its not the sort of thing you need to know for ever more, as who still owns a rickety old pc they say can run said OS/ application.

Minimum specs for Server 2003 enterprise edition

Pentium 133 MHZ CPU

128MB ram (64GB max in an x86 processor, and 2TB max on a 64 bit processor)

1.2GB hard drive

Default Domain Password Policy

When you first DC is set up several items on security are put in place by default. The default domain group policy is configured so that.

under the computer configuration/windows settings/security settings/account policies/password policy the following enteries are made:

enforce password history is set to 24, which means that when users change their passwords it will remember up to 24 previous passwords the user has used. This would stop then cycling from say using "Password1" then "Password2" and then back to "Password1" again, they could only use Password1 after they had created 23 different passwords.

Maximum password Age is set to 42 days, which means that when they set a password it will be valid for 42 days and will expire on the end of the 42nd day.

Minimum password Age is set to 1 day, which means that if a user got a bright idea when their oh so secure "Password1" password expired to change their password 24 times in a day so they can go back round to "Password1" again then they would be unable to do it. Once they have changed their password they would be required to wait 1 day before they can change it again.

Minimum Password Length is set to 7 characters which means pretty much what it says on the tin.

Password must meet complexity requirements is enabled by default. You really want to look at this one with the Minimum Password Length policy setting as this is a big part of securing passwords. a complexity requirement means that a user must have at least 3 components in their passwords and they are capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and symbols. For example password1 does not meet complexity requirements as it only uses lower case letters and a number, however Password1 does as it has a capital letter, lower case letter and a number.

Now while most other settings can be changed to suit you should never really disable the complexity requirement as that would allow your users to use very simple passwords such as "aaaaaaa" even if you change the minimum password length to 14 (which is also the maximum length of password that older clients can use, windows 95,98,mr) then they could still put "aaaaaaaaaaaaaa" as their password.

Store passwords using reversible encryption is disabled by default. This policy should remain enabled unless for some reason you have an application that uses a protocol which requires a users password for authentication purposes. Also this is a requirement if you are using IIS in digest authentication mode.

Anyway thats all I can think of now.

Subnetting Quiz

2008-05-01T22:14:00.001+01:00

Found this on the internet today, its a great little quiz that you can test your subnetting skills with. dont know how many questions there are but it looks like alot!

subnet quiz

Technorati Tags: subnetting,networking

Zyxel pla400

2008-04-29T12:41:00.001+01:00

Bought one of the above the other day from ebuyer to try and remove the ever so slightly dodgey wifi reception in my office.

To be honest I was a little dubious to whether this would work in our house, but I was surprised to find when I plugged it in it just worked!

It has made my remote access to the server and aduc etc loads faster. One thing to note though is that the stated speed over the powerlines is 200Mbs but the ethernet port on the devices are only 100Mbs, so if you generally have a wired gigabit network you may find that this could be a possible bottleneck issue.

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Performance logs and alerts

2008-04-28T13:18:00.002+01:00

Here is 3 handy things to remember with perfmon. These are also the default counters loaded when you start perfmon.

Memory pages/sec this should be below 20 and should not be regularly any higher than 20.

Processor % processor time total; this counter should remain below 85%

Physicaldisk:avg disk queue length: this should remain lower than 2.00 if it goes regularly higher then it could point to a disk problem or too much page file usage.

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Classless subnets

2008-04-25T12:39:00.002+01:00

Yesturday I ordered the mike meyers n+ book, partly as a reference and partly cause it was only 18 quid. got it before lunch and I must say its a brilliant bookm

I've been having a spot of difficulty figuring out classless subnets but after reading the meyers book version of it I must say it all clicked into place. I think it has helped me more in one scan of the pages than any of the mcsa books I've got.

If you are studying too I would recommend this book as a great backup if networking subjets are not quite sinking in, and as its only 18 pounds at the moment on amazon its an absolute bargin.

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Group scope tutorial

2008-04-17T22:12:00.002+01:00

Well here it is, its taking me a couple of evenings to write it and a few more to try and learn about it. I think its not as detailed as it could be but is a good general overview of the group scopes.Please if you read it let me know what you think good, bad or indifferent.

Group Scope Tutorial

70-620 exam cram

2008-04-14T08:40:00.002+01:00

Morning all,

I've just received the new exam cram book for the 620 exam and its flipping tiny. I'm hoping once the 290 is done I can get the 620 out of the way in a couple of weeks.

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Group scopes

2008-04-08T18:45:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I think tonights main area of study will be group scopes, I'm pretty sure that I understand it fully but I just want to make sure. Anyway I'm planning on writing a tutorial on group scopes because I found it hard to locate any resources that really helped me out. I think plenty of mspaint is required when learning this subject as it makes it so much easier.

On another note I've purchased the exam cram book for the 620 vista exam , as I quite fancy studying something lighter for a week or two before moving onto "the beast".

I'm hoping that from a few free test ive done on measure up it'll only take me a couple of weeks to get up to speed on that exam.

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