Blog
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What My Electric Bill Taught Me About the Coming Grid Crisis
How a simple decision about when to run my dishwasher pulled me into a rabbit hole about how the entire North American power grid works, and the quiet crisis most people don’t realize is happening. Part 1 of a series.
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Why I’m Dumping my Windows Phone
I’m an avid Windows Mobile user going back to the Windows Mobile 6.0 days with my Motorola Q9m. I loved that phone; one of the most reliable phones I have ever used. I then found myself upgrading along the way to the HTC 8X, but reliability issues forced me to abandon it. When the Nokia…
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Diary of a Garmin BITS Job Gone Bad
It’s one of those e-mails that no one ever wants to receive… Dear AT&T High Speed Internet Service Customer, We want to remind you that your AT&T High Speed Internet service includes 150 gigabytes (GB) of data for each billing period.. You have exceeded 150 GB this billing period What?!? Of course, I believe it…
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Allowing FTP over HTTP with Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway
I’ve been working with Microsoft’s Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) since it was released back in November 2009 and it continues to surprise me… What I thought would be an easy protocol addition to an existing access rule turned out not to be the case. I was notified of an issue whereby users were suddenly…
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IP2MAC
In all previous instances when working with Windows NLB (Network Load Balancing) I have always used Unicast. Recently, I ran into a scenario where Unicast was not allowed in a VMWare environment, which forced the use of Multicast instead. Apparently, using VMotion works with Multicast as opposed to using Unicast. Note: For a detailed description…
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My Worst Flight
It was Thanksgiving in 1991 and my family and I agreed that for our family reunion in Florida that I would fly everyone down in a small single-engine four-seater Piper Turbo Arrow. I had been flying for several years and I had around 200 hours of flight time and I had just obtained my instrument…
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Adding a Child Domain Using Windows Server 2003 vs Windows Server 2008 R2
If you’ve ever had to add a new domain tree to an existing domain in Active Directory using Windows Server 2003 you may have already realized that you must have DNS configured properly before creating the new child domain. Put another way, if you didn’t know what you were doing you could get into trouble…
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Reading a Remote Registry Key Through Scripting
I’ve been working a lot lately with SCCM DCM (System Center Configuration Manager Desired Configuration Manager). If you’ve worked with ConfigMgr you know how powerful the tool is. The DCM portion of ConfigMgr is particularly powerful when scanning collections for compliance against a set of baselines (comprised of configuration items). The one thing that you…
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Using Sysinternals’ Process Monitor to Troubleshoot a Known Unknown
I was recently tasked to determine why the ASP.NET State Service would not start on a Windows 2003 Terminal Server. All I had to go by was the error message, “Error 5: Access is denied.” In addition to the above error message a cryptic Event 532 was being logged in the security log of event…
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Running a Command Prompt as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
I recently ran into a situation where I was using the SysInternals tool ProcDump to write a dump file to be examined for a memory leak. The problem started when trying to run ProcDump against the process oracle.exe. The error message was “Access denied.” I was an administrator on the server so how could I…
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