Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

So, over the summer I've been setting up and configuring SCOM in our environment.  I've gotten pretty decent with it if I do say so myself. I've written a few custom monitors, have a few management packs imported, you know, generally rocking out with SCOM. My boss wanted me to figure out how to suppress closed alerts in SCOM and I could see why. It was getting a little chatty and most of the custom monitors I had going were set to auto resolve after a certain amount of time. We'd get an email for each resolution state of a critical alert.  

OpsMgr is a very large and complicated program. It's best described as a framework. It's not a matter of installing it, deploying some agents, importing a few management packs and moving on to the next project; It's like an infant being left on your doorstep and you have to raise it up into a productive member of society.Our overall goal for OpsMgr is to handle some of the one-off tasks we can't accomplish with Cacti, not to replace or override Cacti. Cacti is our primary monitoring system. It's predates us using OpsMgr and has had 6+ years to grow into what it's doing today (which is a lot). Though we've had OpsMgr before (SCOM 2007), it was setup to handle some specific monitoring items that Cacti couldn't do. No monitoring system is plug-and-play so any product you get can do a lot with enough work. However, OpsMgr, being designed by Microsoft and part of their System Center suite of IT Management programs, can very deeply monitor the health and avail

One of my current responsibilities at work is managing a system called InformaCast which is an IP paging system created and sold by Singlewire Software and ties into Cisco Unified Communications Manager. InformaCast is engineered with being the foundation of an Emergency Notification System or Mass Notification System. It uses Cisco IP Phones, IP speakers and Desktop computers as an endpoint to deliver text and/or audio messages to. It can also be used by schools or manufacturing plants to control bells and such.

I've had a cell phone for nearly 8 years and a smartphone 5 years now. For all this time, I've never had a case on any of my phones. After years of working in a grocery store (usually night-stock) and working with a lot of glass jars, I've developed quick reflexes to stop most of the fall before a dropped object hits the ground. In fact, I even do the same thing when I drop food (which is not recommended to stop with your foot, BTW). Back to the point though, I decided to get a case for my iPhone 5 and I chose the Otterbox Commuter case. I've been living with the case for over a year now and it's seen it's fair share of drops. I've dropped it at least 4 times, once trying to catch it only to swat it down to the ground like a football player swatting down a pass. It hit the ground hard but the case took all of it, leaving my phone still looking brand new. When small talk turns to phone cases (which actually happens sometimes), I always talk up the Otte

I've had a cell phone for nearly 8 years and a smartphone 5 years now. For all this time, I've never had a case on any of my phones. After years of working in a grocery store (usually night-stock) and working with a lot of glass jars, I've developed quick reflexes to stop most of the fall before a dropped object hits the ground. In fact, I even do the same thing when I drop food (which is not recommended to stop with your foot, BTW). Back to the point though, I decided to get a case for my iPhone 5 and I chose the Otterbox Commuter case. I've been living with the case for over a year now and it's seen it's fair share of drops. I've dropped it at least 4 times, once trying to catch it only to swat it down to the ground like a football player swatting down a pass. It hit the ground hard but the case took all of it, leaving my phone still looking brand new. When small talk turns to phone cases (which actually happens sometimes), I always talk up the Otte

I've talked a lot about file servers lately. I went over what a file server is in general, how to move the data between servers, discussions and walk-thrus of configuring features, the planning and etc. However, this last post on the topic is to discuss the execution, the aftermath and what we didn't see coming. The migration was set to happen Saturday evening. I was told that I could boot everyone off the server at 5pm and we expected the whole thing to take 4-6 hours. I actually got in about 30 minutes before to start collecting reports on the permissions before I started the actual migration.

Have you ever accidentally deleted a file? (And not just accidentally put it in the Recycle Bin.) I mean, really deleted it? Gone forever? It's not fun, right? This is where Volume Shadow Copy comes in. VSC, for short, is a Windows service that makes and maintains snapshots of changes to objects in volumes. It does this not only for your system files like the System Restore feature from your XP days (copying EXEs, DLLs, registry, etc), but it also works with your Documents & Settings. It's worth noting that VSC knows what's changed about items within a volume and that's not to be confused with it actually backing them up, or keeping different versions of the file. With VSC, if your system crashes after a bad Windows Update or bad driver install, you can roll back to a system state prior to the bad install. If you accidentally delete a file (or delete parts of a file), you can right-click on the file, choose the "Previous Versions" tab and see restore poi

Part of my file server project is to also train our NOC staff on the new ways to use the file server. The NOC or Network Operations Center is responsible for network monitoring and being the first round of support for our nearly 1600 users. They answer the phones, put in tickets for other parts of the IT department (Network Admin (my dept), our desktop team, our development team, our security team, etc.). They also manage accounts in AD and part of the new account creation process is making network shares and making sure new employees have access to the correct folders (which are specified by their respective managers in the new user requests). They also review permissions when necessary, restore files via Shadow Copy.... relatively basic stuff with a Windows GUI. However, since we're moving to Server Core, when they remote in to do whatever it is they need to do on the file server, it's going to leave them at a command prompt with no taskbar. Initially, my plan was just to t

File Auditing is another one of those things that isn't very fun but it's still very important. With File Auditing, you can track who created/opened/moved/modified/deleted which file, when and from what computer they did it from. Not only is it great for knowing what's going on with your data, but it's also a key part of making sure your infrastructure is HIPAA, SOX or PCI compliant if your company calls for it. It's important when you're thinking about auditing to cast a wide net. You're not setting this up to "catch" someone doing something wrong. You're doing this to increase visibility into the goings-on of your data; The data you've been tasked with managing. You want to audit things, not people or groups. When you audit people, you might find that they are still doing something wrong but they're not doing the wrong thing you thought they were doing. Also, if you're auditing specific people or specific groups of people, that

Now that we're getting into setting up our features and such, things are starting to get a little bit interesting (of course, this depends on your definition of the word "interesting").  With Deduplication, we've saved a notable amount of space on our file server. Now, let's make configure a File Screening Policy to make sure our users can't save files that have no business need being on the server.