Lots of effort and new toys

Hi all,

Well I've spent a good two or three hours fiddling with ds commands last night and its all starting to sink in. I've been looking at the commands on and off for a couple of weeks and last night I felt I'd made real progress with learning them.

With the way I've designed my AD structure with user nested in departmental OU's in an OU called scrivnet users, this added an additional layer of complexity to my ds commands which I feel has really helped me out.

I've added about 10 users using the dsadd command typing it out from scratch each time so I can memorise how to format it and also look what it does to the object so I can change the next user to include other fields.

I think I shall write another brief tutorial on the commands once I'm quite happy with using them.

On another note last week I picked up a new car an 04 vectra. Its pretty much the same as my old mondeo just with a different badge on the front but it will do me nicely until I'm earning a bit more as I really want a passat eventually.

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New wifi router

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Hi all,

Just thought I’d let you know about a little purchase I’ve made recently and was very surprised by it. I needed to buy a new wifi router for my mum and decided to go with an ebuyer product “plexus 54Mbps wireless router” (its quick find code is 132428 if your interested). The device itself was £18.99. Now I wasn’t really expecting very much for that price for what is essentially a router and wifi access point and 4 port switch but it certainly packs the features in and was very simple to set up.

For a device of this price bracket you had to set up the region and virtual circuit settings etc, but so far its been a breeze to use. The web interface whilst not quite having a professional sheen about it is nice and tidy.

From the ebuyer page heres a list of its features:

Plexus Wireless Broadband Router ADSL2+, providing up to 24Mbps downstream rate and up to 1Mbps upstream rate. The device includes all as ADSL2+, router, wireless AP and 4-port switch in one, suitable for SOHOs and small-sized enterprises. It also supports dual SSID, which can separate the private network from the public one. Meantime, it provides WEP, WPA, WPA2, 802.1x encryption and security mechanism, and supports IP and MAC address filtering to protect your network against malicious attacks. In addition, it supports DHCP server, virtual server, DMZ host, static routing, DDNS, etc. Web management utility, Telnet and SNMP are also supported. Moreover, the device can be managed anywhere through Remote Web management interface.
o Complies with G.dmt, G.lite T1.413 G.992.3(ADSL2)G.992.5(ADSL2+)Annex A standards
o Supports ATM fragmentation/de-fragmentation: CBR rt- VBR nrt-VBR UBR- with-PCR UBR
o Four 10/100M auto-negotiation & auto-sensing fast Ethernet LAN ports
o IEEE802.11b/g wireless access point
o Supports 64/128-bit WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption and 802.x security authentication standards
o USB1.0/1.1 Device port
o Supports Telnet, Local/Remote Web management interface
o Supports VPN pass-through over L2TP, PPTP and IP protocols
o Supports Bridging mode based over 10/100M Ethernet, USB and 802.11g wireless LAN interfaces
o Supports RIPv1, RIPv2 and NAT protocols
o Provides system configuration backup tool
o Supports DHCP Server/clients
o Supports the static IP routing
o Supports MAC address filtering, UPnP, DMZ and IP OoS
o Supports 16 PVC (Permanent Virtual Circuits) entries
o Supports ATM Forum UNI 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 PVC standards
o Supports SNTP protocol
o Supports local administrator, local user and Telnet login
o Supports anti-DOS attack for WAN/LAN, including SYN flooding, IP surfing, ping of Death, fraggle, – UDP ECHO, port 7, teardrop, land
o Supports Point to Point Protocol (PPP): PAP (RFC1334), CHAP (RFC1994) and MSCHAP authentication protocols
o Supports auto wireless channel selection
o Supports dual-SSID for public and private wifi access
o Supports Wireless Distribution System (WDS)
So you cant really complain at all that for twenty quid, and even with next day postage charges bought the total cost cost to a shade under £30.

All in all a great little device.

One extreme to the other

bored

Hi all,

 

I thought i’d write a quick little note about 2 training materials I’ve been exposed too recently. The first is the prep logic audio training for 70-290 and the 2nd is the 70-620 vista config CBT nuggets video training.

 

A while ago I bought the audio training package from prep logic mainly to see what it was all about. I didn’t have any previous experience with this company and must say that the down delivery was most convoluted, you had to download about 7 different zip files to get the full package, why they cant just zip them all up in one big file is beyond me. Unfortunately I also found the package somewhat lacking. The voice was a very monotone chap which to be honest they might have well typed it out and recorded it using the MS narrator (SAM) voice, there was no attempt at any form of personalisation or humour, which im afraid didn’t do it for me. When you buy something that is audio only it is essential to get the listener interested and concentrating on the audio, so I think I’ve lived and learned from that purchase.

 

On a complete opposite is the CBT Nuggets video training package of the 70-620 MS exam. This product seems to be fairly recent and I like the way that the content is presented. The trainer gives in depth content with each of the sections coming in at an average of 35-40 minutes. Also thankfully there is indeed personality and humour in the content which grabs your attention and actually helps you as you wade through the content.

 

any TTFN

ITIL

itil_v_3

 

Hey all, just a quick post to say that my employer is trying to get me a place in an ITIL foundation course in the middle of may, this will include the exam at the end so if I go and pass I can add that to the list of certs i’ve got.

 

Also at the moment I’m thinking about booking my 290 exam for mid april which gives me just over a month to revise for it, but perhaps if I book it then it will encourage me to study more than I am at the moment.

What next?

Well after I've written about volume shadow copy, I think I've now got a pretty good understanding of how it works. I think that now I will now move on and have a look at terminal services, I've fiddled about with that already a bit but I really need to read my books and play with it. Then perhaps I'll write another tutorial when I think I know it quite well.

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Mr writer

Well I've nearly finished my first downloadable tutorial on shadow copy services at the moment its about 3 pages long but isn't too intense. I think actually its a good way for me to solidly learn things as well as reading content from books and trying it out, if I can write instructions for it then I must understand it.

Been out repairing a tourist kiosk today it takes longer to get into the thing than it does to fix the pc's inside! Still was a bit of fresh air and a little drive out of the office for me.

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downloadable doc's

office2007standard

Hmm, when I started writing about shadow copies I got thinking that the topic could get quite long and rather than skate around the details I might look into some storage space to host word docs and pdfs on the subject in question.

 

My thought is I’ll go through the basics on the blog and then point you lot to a document should you want to read any more about it as I think some of the subjects will be a bit too long for a blog post. I’ll have a ponder on that one for a bit!

Shadow copies

Hi all,

Today I've been mostly reading about shadow copies (or volume shadow copies). I've played around with it for a while a decided to read all about it as well to catch anything I've missed in hands on.

I suppose put simply vss allows you the admin to take snap shots of SHARED files on a server. Note shared in uppercase. There are some requirements and best practice associated with vss the first being as you set up where to store the copies it is best practice to store them on a separate volume, also you are required to give at least 100MB to the shadow copies.

You are also able to specify up to 2 schedule points when the shadow copies are created. Let me explain.

You set up the schedule to create copies at 10am and 5pm, and one of your users creates a file at 1030am at 1430 the user return from their normal liquid lunch and makes changes to the file that trashes it. In this instance vss cannot be used as the first shadow copy was created at 10am the file was then created at 1030 which is after the original shadow copy so would not be included in the 10am copy. The file was then trashed at 1430 so has still not been subject to shadow copy love as its not scheduled to run again until 5pm. So in this instances the user gets a rollicking and you the sys admin start thinking about changing the 10am scheduled to 1300 when the users are trotting off to lunch and documents have not been subjected to alcoholic amendments.

Anyway I'll write a bit more on this later.

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