Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
Like thousands of other IT pros out there, I’m testing Windows 7 out on my laptop - since I don’t want to mess around with my main PC, it’s running on some older kit. The problem with that is that there aren’t many Vista drivers around for the hardware - why would there be, it’s not even supposed to be able to run Vista?! It does, however, run Windows 7 very admirably (just one of the many improvements).
I’m in the middle of rolling out Sophos as a replacement to the incumbent McAfee at work. One interesting thing that I found as I rolled out to some test users was that they were unable to log on to one of our internal systems using NTLM (integrated authentication). Instantly the roll out of Sophos was blamed - and I can understand why - the problem did not occur until Sophos was installed.
I have to support about 20 laptops with 3G connections in them, they’re all Dell and range from D800s with PCMCIA 3G data cards, D830s with internal Dell Wireless 5520 Modems and some newer E4200s with internal Dell Wireless 5530 Modems. Both the D830s and the E4200s are shipped with Dell software to manage the connections. The D800s use Vodafone Mobile Connect, and have never, ever, caused me a problem.
Just a quick note to mark the fact that I’ve updated the look and feel of the blog - hopefully with a bit more space and cleaner lines. It’s still teething, so report any bugs you see! I’ve had a bit of a cleanup of the categories to remove some of the less “category” like ones - they were being a bit blurred with the tags.
Lastly, I’m really quite amazed to say that my blog is now well over 100 visitors a day on a weekday, so thank you for visiting!
We have a folder redirection policy in place for all of our users in combination with a roaming profile policy - this policy is applied to the OU that contains our users. Unfortunately this policy was accidently linked to the root of our domain too, causing our Domain Admin users to be redirected too - something we do not want. When the mistake was discovered, the policy was unlinked, but the redirection remained (despite being set to revert when users fall out of scope).
Having just rebooted my laptop, I clicked on the link to open VMWare Infrastructure Web Access in the my browser and was slightly puzzled by the “page cannot be displayed” error. I figured it was probably the VMWare Server Web Access service not starting for some reason, so I opened services.msc and checked it out. The Web Access service was actually running, but the Host Agent service was not, so I tried to start it - it failed.
Just a quick note on a little error I had installing OCS 2007. We have a lot of users that are set up to run services for applications - as such we have a fairly tightly controlled group policy regarding the permissions required to run as a service. This causes the error above to occur because the newly created users aren’t given permissions to run a service. The solution is to add the newly created users to our Application Service group.
Our development SQL server is a monster…there are many many databases, and hundreds, if not thousands of backup files. With each patch tested on the software we sell, there is a new backup. With each client deployment, a new database. With each new major version, a new database. Backups of the new databases inevitably occur, and so we have more files, in more folders - most of which need to be kept in case of roll-backs, bugs or deployment issues.
I was just installing PowerShell on one of my Windows Server 2003 servers, when I encountered the error “You do not have permission to update Windows Server 2003. Please contact your system administrator.” Odd, especially considering that I was installing as the Domain Administrator, and that user should have more than enough permissions. A little bit of digging led me to MSKB 888791 which shows the permissions that are required in Group Policy to install the update.
If you’re getting a error on your LAN connection it’s possible that your network connection is attempting 802.11 authentication on your wired network. Unfortunately, it seems that Vista/Server 2008 both attempt it before reverting. As far as I can see, it’s not causing any issues, other than irritating me with a “failed” and a red question mark.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix! The authentication is handled by the Wired AutoConfig service, so it’s just a case of disabling it.
