I have been given another opportunity to review a book within the Microsoft System Centre 2012 suite of products. The topic of this book is Virtual Machine Manager and the book is released by Packtpub.
I have started to read it and so far I must say it appears to be a concise book taking you through the idea of the type of deployment you will need and installing the product
There is the link for details on the book http://link.packtpub.com/POCsIQ
As in my job we are gearing more and more to using the Microsoft System Centre suite, I decided it I have better read up on the endpoint protection before we look at using it. I started searching for a good book on the subject and found the the Microsoft System Centre 2012 Endpoint Protection Cookbook http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-system-center-2012-endpoint-protection-cookbook/book.
From start to finish this book helps you through the installation of the server, rolling out the client and the updates over the network and configuring groups to define the behavour of the client depending on what group it is a member of. As most of the machines that we would be looking to manage with this tool will be servers I the use of the command line tool mpcmdrun.exe and the use of psexec to connect to remote machine is going to be a great help.
I am really impressed with the knowledge contained in this book and will definitely be using it as a reference to ensure our own SCEP environment runs smoothly.
I know I know this appears to look like just another abandoned blog. At first, second or possibly even third glance you might be right, but the truth is I have been trying to think of content up there and on my other site stephensphotos.co.uk. At least once a week I must have clicked on new post and started writing a new post about what I was doing. Only to scrap it because it didn’t sound interesting enough for you all. Well not this time. This entry is going to be published for you all to see. So without further ado on with the update.
Since my last update way back in January alot has changed. My wife and I have welcomed our 3rd son Thomas Logan into the world. Our eldest Ryan is just gone up to year 11 (5th year for anyone who is too old to know the new school yearing system). So he is about to sit his GCSE’s. Samual is coming on leaps and bounds as a 2 and a half year old. With his latest trick being it is time to become potty trained.
It Is Movember Time
Movember is the new name for November. In Movember men are encouraged to grow moustaches or “mo’s” to rise awareness of men;s health issues such prostate cancer and the other cancers that can affect men. So by grow a “mo” I am inviting people to come up and ask about my “mo”, this will then allow us to talk about the cause.
If you wish to donate to my “mo” growing please click here and then click on donate. Also for more information on Movember please visit http://www.movember.com.
Work Stuff
In other news I am currently building a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 hosting platform. It is quite a exciting and demanding task as there are lots of things to plan and deploy. As I complelte a section I will write a bit about it up here, I will not go into a lot of details but I will talk about any issues I have encountered and how I resolved them.
As with every year that goes past I try and become a little more organised and willing to get on with things. This year is no different, with several house hold tasks that require completing from previous years and some that require starting. Here is a general list so far
I think with everything else including work and spending time with the kids I could sensibly finish all this by March. In work related news I am currently revising for a repeat certification hopefully by Easter. Meaning I will have both Microsoft and Linux qualifications.
Some times you look around at all the stuff you have bought over the years and wonder why or even bought something that you just didn’t need. Today I have made a step to get rid of some of that and placed a few items on ebay.
So far I have placed a brand new battery for a HTC Magic and a Zippo style lighter with rukku from final fanasty x-2
Please feel free to go and have a look and even place a bid.
Now I know I haven’t been updating this site much as I could so with a deep breathe I am going to write about what has been going on since I last updated.
Tonight I logged in to the admin section of this blog and found that the latest version of wordpress was available so without even checking what had been updated I clicked the upgrade button. I am now working away with the new version and this will be the first post written with in.
In what seems like a life time but in fact was only 6 months I have managed to become Microsoft Certified in installing and maintaining it. Exam code MB2-633.
I am currently on a training course an Compellent UK Office learning how to use the features on the Compellent SAN. So far I must admit that the SAN is a great thing. The enterprise manager is a great tool where it will configure the server to automatically connect to the volume you are creating.
*Providing the server has the enterprise manager agents installed*.In the office we are looking at upgrading the current Windows 2008 to the r” edition, this will open up new features within IIS and Hyper-V which we are currently using. I am in charge of planning the upgrade so once I have the upgrade planned I shall write how we are going to perform the upgrade without killing the servers in the process.
I also have the task of upgrading our Thecus SANs to their latest firmware. We currently have two Thecus SAN which sit on our Data Protection Manager system. I have two Thecus boxes to upgrade on Friday. I shall write about how it goes.
So thats it for the moment I will update this on Friday after the upgrade has happened.
Well yet again I haven’t updated this site for well over a month and with that I have decided to write about what I have been upto recently. So with that little bit out of the way lets get straight into it.
Bar a brief spell of an evening I have not been on Facebook since the end of November. The brief spell was to the clear down my wifes farmville whilst she went to midnight mass on Christmas eve.
I haven’t missed it and I don’t believe I am missing out of any events or what my friends are doing.
One of the customer at the company I work for uses the Remote Apps feature of the Remote Desktop role in Windows 2008. I had been asked to add a new remote app server into the farm.
This was of a great interest to learn something new and I can say that I have learnt on this project once this project is finished I shall write up some of the things I have learnt.
A while back I registered a domain to host my photos and stuck coppermine in the webspace and just left it without doing much. Well this has now changed it is running wordpress with a builtin gallery. The idea behind this is to host my photos whilst writing tutorials on what I am learning and reviews on items I have brought. There is a link to this site on the left marked “My Photo Gallery”.
I did it, I finally did it. I managed to pluck up enough self control to deactivate my facebook account and what is better is that a week later I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would.
Was it hard ?
In all honesty I should have done it weeks ago when I first thought about it but I waited. I don’t quite know what I was waiting for. Was I in search for the next great game, A friend request I from someone I have thought to already request or just because I didn’t want to let go..?
What am I doing instead?
Spending time with my wife and two children, starting and finishing jobs around the house reducing the amount of time I spend in front of a PC. Although some time has now been added to play on wii fit and bonding on the xbox360 with the eldest.
Am I going back?
I really hope not. Although there are some times where I end up at the front page they have only been for a spilt second usually because it was my most visited page my browser was trying to be helpful. I feel if I go back I have failed at something and this is one thing I don’t want to fail at. If that day came where I am sucked back into the website called facebook would be a very sad day.
Well I have been using Windows 7 of the last couple of days so I though I would write a review of on how I am finding it.
First of the version of Window 7 I am using is “Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit”.
My machine has a 2.79 GHz Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU with 4GB of RAM and a PNY Geforce 8400 graphics card with 256MB Memory 64-bit. This machine scores a 3.5 and that is due to the Graphics component.
One of the good things is the ability to view which machines you are recently connectrd to via Remote Desktop. Another good feature I have found is the preview with Internet Explore version 8 where you can see all tabs.
I shall write about some more of the features I have found usual later on.
I have had a google android mobile phone for a while I have missed not being able to use my mobile as a modem when out and about.
That has all change now that I have found proxoid for my HTC Magic. http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/wiki/installationLinux. It took me 30 minutes to download everything and setup things up as per the instructions. Everything seemed to go swimming well until it came time to active the forward the my device but my device wasn’t showing in the command “adb devices” so a quick reboot of my laptop and still nothing so I started searching the Internet for any sort of ideas on how to resolve this I couldn’t find anything to help so I rebooted the phone just to see if that would help and bingo. After a very slow but satisfying test I am now happy that when I am on call I am able to go out and not have to be too close to home.
My next article will be added online later this week.