Yet Another IT Professional Blog

Recently, I was working on a vSphere 4.1 upgrade to vSphere 5.5 and of course, first thing first; I had to update all the physical servers to the latest versions of BIOS, firmware, drivers… At a first glance, this seems an easy procedure. I’m thinking to use the Dell iDrac console to update most of the stuff but I soon realized that I wasn’t able to update NIC firmware and BIOS through the iDrac. When you go to the Dell Support web site to download the drivers for a specific model of server, you’ll realize that Dell is offering at least 4-5 different troubleshooting and updater utilities… Some of them are as big as 7.5GB ISO files! The problem with these utilities is that they are not really well documented and it takes a lot of effort to prepare and use them.  Here are a couple of examples;

I am an owner of the Dell Venue 8 Pro since it has been out and to be honest, for a device that I only paid $299, I am extremely happy about it. It's not a powerful device where I can use it as a replacement of my laptop or my desktop... Not even close! But...

Problem : Windows Image Backup is failing while backing up a drive. In my case, it was a "bare metal" backup scenario. You may also find the following error in the "Event Viewer" under "Applications and Services Log, Microsoft, Windows, Backup" "The backup operation that started at '‎2014‎-‎05‎-‎13T16:49:41.618242900Z' has failed with following error code '0x807800C5'

Recently, one of my users lost all his auto-complete list from his mailbox! For me, this is no big deal as I barely send emails but for our employees who sends / receives hundreds of emails per day, it's a pretty big deal and a very practical feature to have. Outlook will create a little database of the email addresses that you send or receive emails from into a file generically called "Auto-Complete". In the previous versions of the Microsoft Office suite, this file was the famous "NK2" file.

One of our users was having bizarre problems with her account. We tried to troubleshoot to find out what was causing the real issue but nothing was clear. Before I even tell you what the reason was, let me tell you first what the symptoms were. First user reports that she has a warning when she logs onto her computer.   I confirmed that she was getting a Windows 7 balloon warning “ Windows cannot locate the server copy of your roaming profile ”. When you browse Event Viewer , Windows Logs\Application , you should see another error with the error ID 1521 with a description “Windows cannot locate the server copy of your roaming profile and is attempting to log you on with your local profile. Changes to the profile will not be copied to the server when you log off. This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.” Just these 2 symptoms were indicating a Roaming Profile issue, which makes sense because the user is part of an OU, which roaming...

To get access to a specific mailbox with all permissions use the following command in “Exchange Management Shell” Get-Mailbox username | Add-ADPermission –user username –AccessRights GenericAll To get access to a specific Exchange Mailbox database and all of the mailboxes that this database contains, use the following command in “Exchange Management Shell” Get-MailboxDatabase –identity “ mailbox database name ” | Add-Permission –user username –AccessRights GenericAll Done!

If you’ve never heard of DD-WRT by now… You should go to that link quickly. ( http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index ) DD-WRT is a Linux-based firmware for wireless routers and wireless access points. Basically, it’s a firmware compatible with some cheap end-user wireless routers. Once you load that firmware on your router, you get lots of cool networking features that you would normally find in enterprise products for a lot of $$$. Some of the cool features of DD-WRT are WDS, VLAN, Multiple SSID, QoS, different wiles modes (Access Point, Bridge, Repeater, etc…), and the list goes on… It’s free to download and use. Please use it at your own risk because during the process of flashing your router, you can also “brick” your router although, I’ve never experienced this personally. Not every router is compatible with DD-WRT, so please check the “compatibility” page before trying anything. Compatible Router Database http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/router-database In this article,...