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Drac cards are the Dell version of Compaq's Lites-out card and have been around for many years, and are now in their 7th iteration. They are effectively a mini PC with its own power supply and (ideally) LAN port which stays on regardless of whet the serer is doing - even it has gone zombie or crashed. So with IP access to the DRAC card a [...] Read more

Anyone who looks after remote servers will be a regular user of RDP, VNC and other remote access tools. The basic Microsoft RDP client works fine but it limited to a single target. For Sysadmins something which allows a library of targets to be created and maintained is essential. MS themselves make available their (free) Remote Desktop Manager [...] Read more

As we all now, Java is, frankly, a nightmare in terms of security and older applications such as the Dell remote access controller which use embedded but uncertificated Java apps are basically unfixable. I was trying to run a DRAC session in Chrome to look at an ailing Dell R200 server and whilst i could get to the DRAC & login fine every time [...] Read more

Anyone with a Win 2008R2 or Win 7 machine will have noticed that the winsxs directory in the %systemroot% directory just grows and grows over time. And a search on Technet and Google suggest any deletions or otehr playing around in here is a bad idea. So try: dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded - which will remove any old service pack [...] Read more

If the built-in rules in Exchange don't work for you then this might help: Sub AutoForwardAllSentItems(Item As Outlook.MailItem) Dim myFwd As Outlook.MailItem Set myFwd = Item.Forward myFwd.Recipients.Add "[email protected]" myFwd.Send Set myFwd = Nothing End Sub Add this as a script in Outlook [alt+F11] and then set a rule to [...] Read more

This one arose on a Windows 7 x64 box which had been working finr. Turned out to be an easy one to fix.. for some reason the MS task scheduler - not Macrium - had lost the password used to run the task. Re-add it and all was well. But why..?? Error 0x8004131f, alson on a differnt W7 x64 box took a bit more work to track down. It turned out to be [...] Read more

I was setting Macrium - an excellent disk imaging progam - up on an oldish XP box today and whilst it installed and ran fine whenever I tried to schedule a job it failed with an error about 'Keyset'. Now Keyset is part of the dark magic which is the cryptography service on 'NT' class machines and nothing to do with Macrium but [...] Read more

Many tools generate CSV outputs of IP numbers which can then be imported into Excel for further work. However, Excel does not allow these to be sorted and so some 'magic' is required. I claim no credit for this at all - Google is your friend! - and fond this formula on a Japanese web site. If one applies this to the cells with IP numbers [...] Read more