I have been working with a company to develop a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. The company had already been using an MDM provider for iOS devices. They were looking to move forward the iOS based policies to Android. I will share some of the challenges that we have faced so far with supporting Android based devices.
Encryption
One requirement that they had was Encryption. They were fine with… Continue reading
I recently needed a script to enable new users for Lync. I wanted a way to be able to prevent specific users from being enabled for Lync and automatically disable them if they are not authorized to use the application... Even if they had the application installed.
I decided to use a Security group called Lync - NO ACCESS. Here is the script that I came up with. It runs once… Continue reading
One of the features of Lync that my company has been really excited about are the mobile applications. We feel that they can provide a great benefit to the company. I followed all of the detailed configuration instructions, but for some reason the push notifications were not working to my iOS and Windows Phone 7 devices. Android obviously worked fine, because they do not rely on the push notification system… Continue reading
I had one of my client techs in Europe reach out to me this week and state that he had a license violation with one of our systems and that it would not activate Windows. I am in a pretty large enterprise and we use KMS for our Windows 7 activations. I gave our client tech some KMS commands to try, but he had no luck. He sent me the… Continue reading
One of our developers reached out to me and mentioned that he was having a performance issue on one of his virtual machines running on VMware ESXi 4.1. He was running a .net 4.0 Website with SQL Express. This was a demo server, so they did not want to purchase a full SQL license and continue to use SQL Express. He mentioned that on this demo virtual machine, one CPU… Continue reading
My company recently purchased a few Mac Mini devices. We wanted to dual boot them with Windows 7. We also wanted to use them on our Cisco Enterprise Wireless. I had issues connecting the native bootcamp Windows 7 drivers to our wireless. A quick fix was to install the HP sp45524 drivers. These drivers added the LEAP options that I needed to join the corporate wireless.
Here is a direct link
After setting up my Edge box and successfully logging in via my Windows 7 box from home... I soon realized that our XP boxes were unable to login through the Edge box. We are actually using the OCS 2007 R2 client and connecting to our Lync 2010 infrastructure. I thought that this may be the issue, but after some research, it was not.
XP by default will connect to Lync… Continue reading
After successfully configuring my Lync 2010 environment for external access from mobile devices, I was surprised to hear that our Windows Phone 7 devices could not connect. My Android and iOS devices were connecting fine. To get the WP7 devices to work, I had to make the following change to our ISA Reverse proxy rule.
I recently inherited our Lync 2010 project. I was very excited about this, because Lync seems like it will be the next big thing in the Enterprise. I immediately wanted to get the mobile pieces of Lync working. I had already seen the iOS, Android, and WP7 apps that were announced some time ago.... I was excited to see them in play.
It looks like a lot of people have… Continue reading
I built some dynamic scripts to update our Oracle HR database with employee information from Active Directory. I ran into an issue where I had some names with hyphens. My Oracle update statements were blowing up with an Oracle Error - "ORA-00933: SQL command not properly ended"
Here is an example of one of the statements that failed:
update hr_ad set EMAIL_ADDRESS = 'O'Donnel@andywolf.com', ACTIVE_DIRECTORY_NAME = 'Odonnel@ad.andywolf.com', DISTINGUISHED_NAME = 'CN=O'Donnel\, Test,OU=Users,DC=ad,DC=andywolf,DC=com' where… Continue reading
I built some rather intense PowerShell scripts recently. I wanted the ability to log the output of these scripts, so that I could go back at anytime to review the results of a script.
One of the coolest commandlets in PowerShell is the Start-Transcript commandlet. It is an easy way to record the entire session of the script. What I ended up doing was adding a "write-host" or "write-output" to my… Continue reading
This week I ran into an issue where the PowerShell console was taking several minutes to launch. I was running the PS Console on a server and had not seen this issue previously on this system. I happened to be using a service account that I was going to use to run a scheduled task (executing the .ps1). I was seeing the delay when executing the scheduled task as this… Continue reading
I took my VMware Certified Professional certification exam today and I passed! I have been wanting to focus on this for the last few years, but never had the time. Since it is Winter, I decided to knock this thing out.
For anyone looking at taking the VCP exam, I highly recommend setting up your own lab and testing out every feature available. My company is a heavy VMware shop, but… Continue reading
I was setting up a new vSphere 5 environment on some HP DL380 G7's in one of our remote offices and I needed to configure NTP on the hosts. It is critical that the servers have the correct time, especially if you are virtualizing DC's. Even if you are not syncing time with the host, if the clock on the physical hardware is incorrect, it can cause a real mess… Continue reading
I have posted many times about my 2008 R2 Domain Controller upgrade project. It has moved slowly, because of some legacy applications that would not support 2008 R2 DC’s. I am finally moving forward and I recently discovered an issue that I had to share. This is another one of those issues that did not have a lot of good information on the net and I definitely believe this post… Continue reading
I recently posted about an issue with Lingering Objects in my AD environment. This post will explain exactly how that happened and how to prevent it with your VMware Guest DC's. This is a MUST READ if you have VMware guests as domain controllers!
A few weeks ago, we had a power outage in our DR facility. When the facility came back online, so did our vSphere hosts and… Continue reading
We recently had an issue where a few DC's in our DR site came online with a date that was older than the tombstone life of 60 days. This issue introduced some lingering objects in to our directory. If you are unfamiliar with lingering objects, they are basically objects that exist on one (or a few) DC's but not others hosting the same partition.
One thing that… Continue reading
I previously posted a PowerShell script to ping a list of systems and output the systems online. I recently had the need to ping a list of 150 or so IP addresses, determine their location, and remediate an issue with the systems online at the time. I decided that I would first look to see if anyone else had created a script of this kind.
I discovered a new… Continue reading
I upgraded my Web Servers to Adobe ColdFusion 9 as soon as it was released. I attempted to use the new Server Manager feature in CF9. I could connect to my webservers with Server Manager and I was receiving the following error:
"Failed to read the data… Continue reading
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