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I was setting up a VM recently for a client and thought they had a Datacentre license but after it was all done & dusted it turned out they only had a 'Standard' version VLA key - which of course wouldn't work. So what to do? Start again from scratch was the obvious answer but they needed the server NOW so perhaps there was another [...] Read more

The various types of Windows event logs are really useful tools when trying to debug something going bad on a server, but they can be a bit 'clunky' to work with. A low cost - or possibly free - solution is Event Log Explorer which allows logs to be merged from different servers, colour coded, alerts set and so. Highly recommended and [...] Read more

What to do when the GPOs vanish from your Windows 2012 server..read more..

I've been working on a web site for a mobile application and wanted to grab 'pages' on a scheduler and upload them to a debugging file dump but wanted to NOT upload screen grabs which were faulty. This should have been easy as the 'bad' screen grabs are either 100% black or 100% white and so much smaller in file size then the [...] Read more

For more on this see this page - full details of how to install OMSA on ESXi 5.5 See also: http://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/SLN156156

Always useful to be able to test SMTP servers by using Telnet on port 25. Here is a simple list of command to achieve this. ehlo mydomain.com mail from:<[email protected]> rcpt to:<[email protected]> data This is a test, please do not respond . quit

I've seen this several times on different client sites in the last year and finally got to the bottom of fixing it - and have some ideas about the cause too. But first, the problem. A user with a roaming profile logs on OK but gets a message that the profile is not totally synchronised. The 'fix' for this is to delete a specific [...] Read more

I recently had to increase the physical drive space on a VM Server 2.x system to allow a Windows 2008R2 server a bit more space to grow. This is relatively easily done by closing down the host and using the CLI VMWare tools to grow the hosts partition, - say from 25 to 30Gb. [BTW, do NOT use the GUI version as it always corrupts the host disk and [...] Read more