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And you lot thought I was dead.

Filed Under: General, Microsoft by Stephen — Leave a comment
November 4, 2011

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.

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New year new me!

Filed Under: General, Linux by Stephen — Leave a comment
January 5, 2011

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

  • Finish back fence and fit gate
  • Paint bathroom
  • Paint living room
  • Tidy garage

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.

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Selling stuff on Ebay

Filed Under: General by Stephen — Leave a comment
September 9, 2010

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.

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site update

Filed Under: Computing, Microsoft by Stephen — Leave a comment
June 23, 2010

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.

WordPress upgrade

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.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4

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.

New training

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*.

Windows 2008 R2 Upgrade

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.

Upgrading Thecus SANs

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.

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General Update

Filed Under: General, Photos by Stephen — Leave a comment
January 29, 2010

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.

Facebook update

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.

Remote Apps Via Remote Desktop / Terminal services

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.

New look Photo Website

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”.

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A week without facebook

Filed Under: Computing by Stephen — Leave a comment
November 30, 2009

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.

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Window 7 review

Filed Under: Microsoft by Stephen — Leave a comment
November 4, 2009

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.

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Tethering google android to a linux box

Filed Under: Computing by Stephen — Leave a comment
October 26, 2009

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.

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The ease of Terminal Server printing in Windows 2008

Filed Under: Uncategorized by Stephen — Leave a comment
September 25, 2009

One of the issues that seems to come up a lot is that newer printers don’t work on a server when connecting via terminal server without having to install the printer drivers on the server. Bring in Windows Server 2008 with this new operating system come Terminal server easy print, this will redirect your printer jobs on the terminal server to your printer on your local machine without having to install any extra drivers on the server.

There is some required software to get this to work.
for Window XP you need to following

* Windows XP Service Pack 3
* .Net framework 3.0
* .Net Framework 3.0 SP1
* Remote Desktop Client version 6 (Comes with Windows XP SP3)

For Vista you need

* .Net framework 3.0
* .Net Framework 3.0 SP1

Once these requirements have been meet log on to the server load up gpedit.msc under the heading

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Terminal Services\Terminal Server\

enable “Printer Direction” .

Disconnect from the remote desktop session and reconnect and viola you can now print to your local print without installing any drviers.

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A computing update

Filed Under: Microsoft by Stephen — Leave a comment
July 2, 2009

Well I know I haven’t written much about the type of computing I have been doing recently,  well that is about to change.

As I work on a support desk having to do technical support and new service provisioning. I spend a lot of time working on helping our users troubleshoot issues they may have.

Recently I have been building a virtual exchange 2007 server server a virtual machine with Icewarps merak mail server. once I have the whole thing configured and built I shall do a write up on provisioning the setup.

Today I have been setting up a MS FTP 7.5 server which allows connections of SSL. The main instructions for the service were obtained from iis.net but I then encountered some problems being able to connect to the service from the Internet.

As my office has a direct VPN connect to the servers it was difficult to test the connection. what we found for the Internet was the passive connection could not be established after the initial FTP connection.

We found after reading Configuring FTP Firewall settings also from iis.net and applying the firewall rule

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP for IIS7" service=ftpsvc action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in

and adding the passive connection ports to the Windows Firewall the issue seems to be resolved.

One thing I must add is that if you are using the ftp server for yourself and just want to encrypt the traffic a self signed certificate is OK but if you are opening up the server the clients, suppliers, partners or any one else I would suggest a certificate from a recognised certificate body like Thawte or Verisign and other certificate authorities are also available.

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