Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

Just to recap, we discussed the ways to migrate our data to a new file server and the caveats involved in Part 1. In Part 2, we took a look at a staged roll-out or a single fell-swoop for our migration. Here in Part 3, we'll take a look at the features we're looking to setup for our new file server. A couple of these are new or refined for Server 2012 but some of them have been around a version or two. The coolest and most exciting feature is Deduplication.

In part 2 of migrating our main File Server from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012, we'll look at the logistics of the migration. There's 2 ways that I've identified of going about the move; One-Few-Many and All-At-Once.

File Service is possibly the most basic and important service provided on a network. I say it's the most important because next to email, a business can't run if it's workers can't access their files. I also say it's one of the most basic because there's no special program that has to be running on the server like Exchange or something. There's no crazy settings to muck around with either (that is, unless you count managing NTFS permissions as "mucking"). It's a big box where people store their files on the network. In fact, it's so simple it's almost beautiful. Almost. Below, I talk about how to migrate your data between file servers, namely from Server 2008/2008r2 to Server 2012.

Today marks the official reveal from Ford of their next generation Ford Mustang. This generation kicks off the 50th year of the pony car and the Mustang Community, long-time fans of the Mustang, and the world as a whole have all been waiting to get a glimpse of Dearborn's new iconic sports car.

In each of our 2 data centers, we have Symmetra 20kVA UPS units. I've seen UPS units before but these are nothing like the black Smart-UPS units under every office worker's desk. These Symmetra units are HUGE.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of pets. My parents told me we had a cat but I was too young to remember. The earliest pet I remember having was a rabbit named Oliver (and we didn't have him long thanks to his passion for both electrical cords and chewing things). I never liked dogs. Truth be told, I was scared of them as a kid. They were usually bigger dogs and who were trained to play a bit rougher than I was ready for. To top it off, most of the little dogs I met were simply assholes. Hell, I still haven't met a yorkie that isn't a giant dick for such a small creature. Because of all this, I've always considered myself a cat person. Yes, Cats are assholes too but they're easy to take care of, independent and can be fun to play with (when THEY want to play that is). Well, that has all changed since my fiancee and I recently adopted a Pug. He's been amazing. He's the first small dog I met that didn't love only one person. He loves everyone he meet...

Have you been tasked with migrating Data Protection Manager (DPM) to a new server? Have you too that the TechNet resources for it don't even scratch the surface? Me too. Read below as I discuss my adventure of moving DPM to a new server.

I wouldn't say I'm out-right lazy but I am always looking for ways to be more efficient in anyway I can. Being creative and always looking for a better way to do things is almost a necessary trait to possess in the IT field and helps in most other aspects of life as well. Last year, my fiancee and I moved into a 2 bedroom condo with mostly hardwood floors. The only carpet in the place is on the stairs and the hallway between the 2 bedrooms. The rest are these beautiful, mildly dark, reddish hardwood floors. My only complaint is how dusty it gets. We change our AC filter out every couple months but other than that, there's not much more that I'm aware of to cut-down the amount of dust in the house. We clean our place weekly but every weekend, I sweep up what feels like a ton of dust and crumbs. With that and the fact that we just adopted a pug, our floors get dirty in no-time. The same day we got Wayne (the pug), my fiancée gave me the green-light to get a robot vacu...

By the time this is posted, she'll have said yes. I proposed to my girlfriend and the proposal has required a bit of planning. I wanted it to be something thoughtful and have a story worth telling later on. I know too many couples who's story of "How'd he propose?" go something like "I dunno; I just asked her one day and she said yes. The rest is history." Fair enough but I wanted to do something a bit more.

A non-techy friend of mine asked me how to get into IT. She's smart, articulate and could likely be molded into a great IT gal. We were texting each other, mostly just catching up. I hadn't seen her for a while and we recently got back in touch. The usual questions were in order; We got to talking about work and that's when she asked me. I didn't answer it for 2 reasons; Firstly, the answer was longer than my thumbs and the tiny keyboard on my iPhone could reasonably handle. Secondly, I didn't have a straight answer for her. I myself asked the same question years ago. I had this long write-up on how I came to get into IT but I recently watched a great video that explained it better than I could have. It was by  Eli The Computer Guy  and was very thorough. I've linked the video below for your convenience so I suggest giving it a watch if you're thinking about an IT career but aren't sure where to start.

What? Manage contact lists in Lync? Why would you do that? I understand both arguments to this. One one hand, adding contacts isn't that hard to do. Despite being buddy-buddy with Exchange and being very feature packed, Lync is still just an IM client for many organizations. From the end-user perspective, it's as easy to manage as Google Chat, AIM, or Pidgin is (which are all more or less easy to use). So if it's so easy to use, why would you manage contact lists for your users? Because this is a company communication method and all of the other company communication methods are managed by IT. Email, phone system... That's about it. One could argue that it's about providing an efficient way to contact colleagues within your organization. We manage contact lists in Lync for our users (Lync Server 2010) but we're looking to move to Lync Server 2013 and our custom script won't work. I was asked by one of our Admins a while ago to look into a couple tools we...

I don't have any projects in my new Jr Admin role but my new boss gave me access to and documentation for our Data Protection Manager, or DPM server. I don't necessarily have to memorize how to do everything with it: Just get a decent grasp for how it works and the rest will come. Before jumping head first into DPM, I wanted to refresh on traditional backups and how they work.

Laying it out on the table, I've been looking for another job. I really like my current job but like any other job, it has pros and cons, things I love about it and things I hate about it. Just a recap for anyone who doesn't know, I work in the Network Operations center (aka, NOC) for a large Housing Department of a major university. We support the full IT needs of the staff (mostly administrative, custodial and maintenance staff) and limited scopes of support for the student-side of things (online check-in for housing, website hosting for various student Student Affairs groups, Internet services for the students in residence halls, etc). We're the first round of support. There's one phone number and one email address that 3 of us work out of. In many cases, we can help. Someone locked out their account, email "isn't working", "How do I do this?" sort of stuff. For things we can't fix, we create a ticket and assign it to the proper group. We...

Full disclosure, this is more a note for my future-self but I'll share it with you too. I got a new laptop for work (still a heavy-as-hell Dell Inspiron E65xx series so nothing to write home about) but it's completely fresh. It's nice to setup a new computer. However, I've learned that Active Directory (AD) isn't just something that's on every Windows machine, rather, it's something you enable. Not only that, there 2 ways to do it. Here's how to do it.

We have 4 Admins on my department's Network & Systems Administration team. The Security Admin and Network Engineer also manage Linux/Unix stuff while the other 2 admins are our Windows Admins, which is where most of our services run. One Windows Admin oversees the NOC (where I currently work) while the other manages our VMWare infrastructure as well as Mailmeter, our Cisco UCS blade systems, backups, etc. One Windows Admin has the NOC as well as a small team of student assistants that handle support duties to our residents under him. Security Admin, Network Engineer, and Other Windows Admin all have their own Jr Admins as well. Chris is a Jr Admin under our Security Admin and Steven is Jr Admin under our Network Engineer. Chris and Steven were both working in the NOC when I started and were 1 by 1 promoted to Jr Admin positions. Our other Windows Admin had Patrick, an older IT guy who worked here for almost a year. Patrick recently took a job elsewhere so I asked Other Wind...

Ok, so it's not a real server but based on my research, it should be enough to meed my modest needs for a home lab setup. Back in the day, I had my gaming rig dual- and triple-booted with Windows and a flavor or two of Linux but I also had this old Pentium III eMachines PC with Win2k and 256Mb of RAM. My step-brother was getting rid of it so I took it. I added a PCI NIC I had laying around, installed Debian and that was my server. I setup DHCP3 and Apache on that machine and it was running for months. I had a "Hello World" site with DynDNS setup and somehow Comcast found it.It didn't take long to get a C&D letter. I should've learned HTML and did something with it but I never made it that far.

Even though I know I'm at least a couple years from seriously buying a new bike, I'm still always shopping. With the internet as my primary shopping tool, I find myself boiling bikes down to the numbers. On paper, Bonnies, Sportsters and others aren't terribly impressive. However, in their day they were fast as hell. Now, we've got street-legal machines that can do 0 to speeding ticket in a few seconds. The dealers might as well take the license plate brackets off and throw in free tire warmers because these new machines are designed with the nearest track in mind.

I know the title doesn't sound like that of an iPhone review but the iOS experience really is a walled garden of sorts. The reason for this is largely because Apple plays a large role in deciding how their devices should an shouldn't be used. This isn't a new concept. AOL did it in their hay-day. They started their business with revenue-sharing agreements with specific information providers in their subscriber-only space. Facebook does it too, requiring you to login to their site before you can view profiles, play games, etc. This isn't to say that a walled garden approach is particularly bad. In the case of Apple, it's actually pretty good. If you want to do something with your phone that Apple decides shouldn't be done with it, tough cookies. However, for most intents and purposes, the iPhone just works and works great.

Earlier last week, I was asked to setup a new phone for our IT Director. I've setup phones before so I figured it couldn't be too big of a task. I'm definitely not well-versed with Cisco's Unified Communications Manager (aka, UCM) but I knew enough to be dangerous. What I thought was going to be a simple swap turned into something more than I'd bargained for.