UVM Blogs

Since the beginning of 2010, UVM Police Services has sought ETS’s help in 104 device-theft cases pertaining to UVM students, faculty, and staff. One recurring theme is that there are two simple steps that users […]

This week we are continuing testing of the new Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Management 2.0 tool (MBAM).

MBAM is not overly complicated, but it does have several service tiers and dependencies which […]

As part of our evaluation of a SQL Consolidation Server, I am attempting a deployment of SQL Reporting Services in a load-balanced environment (using F5 load balancers in layer 4/fast npath config). I have […]

We are looking into using Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) 2.0 to manage BitLocker in our environment. One requirement for MBAM is a SQL Server database instance that supports Transparent […]

Anyone who depends on System Center Operations Manager 2012 (or any earlier version of SCOM, back to MOM) likely has noticed that notifications are a bit of a weak spot in the product.

To address this, we have […]

We’ve all seen URLs shortened by bit.ly and its cousins: Unwieldy juggernauts like […]

Yesterday I received a strange error report from a person trying to create a new SharePoint site collection.  Our front line guy went to investigate and found that she was getting a “User cannot be found” error […]

We have rolled out five new themes today, a combination of magazine-style and general blogging layouts. All are responsive for attractive display on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

Book Lite is a […]

Very, very exciting.

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Regular readers of my blog (all two of you) may recall the “series” I started this fall on Windows 8 launch devices (concerning the HP Envy X2 and the Samsung SmartPC Pro 700t). These devices both had strengths, […]

Microsoft KB 187498 describes the registry values that can be used to disable various security protocols. Disabling SSLv2 is as easy as

This does require a reboot to put into affect.

WordPress on UVM Blogs has been updated to the latest release.  The most exciting feature is an overhauled media manager, making it vastly easier to upload and manage images and other attachments and embed them in […]

Annoying task… configuring VMware View desktops for use in an environment that utilizes VMware View.  Some say, don’t put the management agent on the View desktop, just rebuild your desktops every time there is […]

As promised in my previous post, here is my current VBScript for configuring the Windows 7 Start Menu and Taskbar. Not beautiful, but certainly functional. My thanks to JuliusPIV and cogumel0 for doing the heavy […]

I administer a server VM with a lot of disks, and many of them are the same size. When I need to make changes to the system’s storage, I’m always nervous that I’m going to poke the wrong disk. I could trust that […]

This week I have been working on updating our VMware View template for our public terminals (those are kiosk and lab systems).  As always, simple things have become difficult, and time has disappeared like cookies […]

We are going live with out first public VMware View terminals this week (Wyse P25 “zero-clients”… nice units).  I had what I expected would be a easy list of “little jobs” to be completed before going live. […]

It started with an alert from System Center Operations Manager about a failed scheduled task. Of course, the alert references a task name that looks like a SID.  Running schtasks /query show a few jobs with a […]

The journey continues…

The boss approved purchase of a Samsung ATIV SmartPC Pro (the “700T” model).  I wassoooexcited… this was the tablet PC I had been waiting for.  Thin, light, and fully convertible from […]

In desperation over our inability to tell University employees what they should be looking for in a Windows 8 tablet, I asked the boss if we could get our hands on one of the new Intel “Atom” processor-based […]

I have been working on a function to convert the output of NET SHARE commands into usable PowerShell objects. In the course of my work, I was storing the output of the command in a variable, which I later pass […]

Something that comes up with some frequency on Terminal Servers (or “Remote Desktop Servers”), but perhaps sometimes in VDI, is “How to I move a user profile from one drive to another”. The traditional answers […]

We are in the final stages of preparation for the long-overdue upgrade to SharePoint 2010.  I have set up a preview site with a copy of the production SharePoint content database, and I want to notify all site […]

This video of a presentation by Scott Chacon has helped me start to get my head around Git.

I’ve started experimenting with Git in my current PowerShell project, and I’m going to […]

You would think this one would be easy…

Some of our users were noticing that it was taking over 30 seconds to launch IE to a web site that was configured at the command line (i.e. we run “iexplore.exe […]

vSphere 5.1 arrived this summer to no great fan-fare. We waited a few weeks, heard no sounds of howling pain (we did not listen very hard, I guess), and decided to proceed with upgrading vCenter.  I have been […]

It’s the eleventh hour. You’ve been working on a project for months. Maybe it’s a grant application. It’s all coming together: people; facilities; legal; technology. Suddenly, someone steps in and says, “Wait a […]

Previously we explored how to increase the success rate of unattended application upgrades using our handy “killAndExec” VBScript. This works well for about 80% of our applications. What about Adobe Reader? […]

Today’s scripting challenge…

We are attempting to use SCCM 2012 as a patch management solution for our centrally supported third party applications.  Great new features in SCCM 2012 allow us to write […]

I have updated the theme of the top-level UVM Blogs site.  It now displays much better on different screen sizes–including phones–and brings site activity front and center so you can more quickly see what people […]

So Windows 8 is here, to little fanfare at the University.  While I am always happy to have an updated version of Windows to work with, I see that I have yet to blog anything about it.  Perhaps that is because, unlike with the release of Windows 7, there was so little that was relatively [...]

I’m working on some storage issues with our file services, and DFS Namespace services may the the best solution. But I will need to be able to keep the permissions on the DFS folders with targets in sync with the […]

For the past eight month, I’ve been working with EMC and Microsoft to diagnose a problem. Several time a month, during the backup of our primary Windows 2008 R2 file server, all the VSS shadow copies get deleted […]

Yea! Kathy and I are going on another voyage! Fall 2012, Atlantic Exploration. http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyages/fall-2012/ 14 ports, 12 countries, 4 continents. We have our passports, with the requisite number of empty pages. We have our inoculations (including Yellow Fever). We have our visas for Ghana and Brazil. We have our anti-malaria…[Read more]

Recently, I wanted to provide a client with a list of groups that related to some work he was doing. I wanted the group names as well as their location with AD. Although I often use the ds* commands or excellent ADfind tool for this type of task, I had been working in PowerShell on another [...]

Recently, I wanted to provide a client with a list of groups that related to some work he was doing. I wanted the group names as well as their location with AD. Although I often use the ds* commands or excellent <a href="http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/adfind/index.htm&quot; […]

In my discussion and demo at the IT-Discuss Live – Security event in May, I used a short slide deck to describe—in broad terms—how PGP Whole Disk Encryption works. This laid the foundation for working through some […]

I really like the newer event log model on Windows 2008 family, and the flexibility of the XML events and the queries that makes possible.
Recently, I started noticing a quiet failure of a scheduled task. The […]

Trouble getting applications developed using .NET Framework 2 or 3 to install on Windows 8 Release Preview? “Error message 0x800f0906:  “Windows couldn’t connect to the Internet to download necessary files. Make sure that you’re connected to the Internet, and click Retry to try again.”?  Me too… Windows 8 features a new “install on demand” model [...]

Mozilla Thunderbird 13 arrived this week.  Guess what?  Our customized build process broke again.  Now, when you start TB for the first time, you get greeted with the option to create a new email account with one of Thunderbird’s “partners” (in other words, email providers who paid for the honor of being put in the [...]

I got stupid again this week and decided to investigate management of Mac computers.  Since we are both cheap and overworked, I wanted a solution that would be both free, and would not require any new infrastructure.  The only options that came to mind were either to extend our OpenLDAP server to support apple schema, [...]

Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without.

There are some things that we can’t really do without. But good old Yankee thrift pains me every time I have to replace printer consumables. I have a <a…[Read more]

WordPress has been updated to version 3.3.2, fixing several security issues.  If you notice any problems, please let us know.

Shortly after releasing MDT 2012 on the general public I got a call from a colleague who told me that his LiteTouch deployment was failing.  He was able to boot to LiteTouch media, go though the configuration wizard, and initiate setup.  LiteTouch would partition the drive, Windows Setup would start, the image would get written [...]

I decided to give some of my user base something that they have been asking for for a long time… the ability to run MDT/LiteTouch deployments entirely from removable storage media. I had avoided doing this in the past as we made significant use of the MDT database in selecting hardware-specific support applications (such as [...]

I have been running Windows 8 CP on my primary workstation for about two weeks now.  The experience is surprisingly good, although I am sure that work-a-day users of Windows are going to freak out at the site of the Metro, especially when accessed from the traditional Windows keyboard and mouse.  To that end, I though [...]

We use EMC NetWorker for our enterprise backup solution. Since we migrated our primary file server from a NetApp filer to a native Windows server, we’ve been having a recurring problem with all the Shadow Copies […]

This week I went to rebuild our MS DaRT Emergency Rescue Disk media.  While looking into the available tools to automate injection of our LiteTouch / MDT Deployment Workbench driver store into the DaRT boot media, I discovered something interesting in the MDT 2012 RC1 release notes… MDT 2012 supports the addition of DaRT into the [...]

Amid the praise for and complaints about the newer version of webmail, we received a plea from a netbook user. She pointed out that the new layout made it very difficult to navigate among her mail folders. I use a […]