Tech Note: Command Line Interface – Ping

Pinging Internet connections and network devices can be an extremely useful first step when diagnosing network problems. Windows has a tool called Ping, which, as the title of this post suggests, is run from the command line. It is used to test the reliability of a host on an IP network, and to measure the time taken for messages sent from the originating computer to reach the destination host or network device.

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Blog: London Site Visit

In my day to day role as an IT Pro, I have to visit customer sites to perform hardware maintenance. Today is one of those on days for me. I was tasked with replacing a failing HDD within a server located in a customer data centre. In modern servers a failed HDD is not a problem, they are hot swap. Unfortunately this server is nearly 15 years old, runs Windows NT4 Workstation, and the drive is buried deep inside the machine. The only option is to visit site and replace it.

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Certs: 1.1 Deploy & Manage Server Images (70-411)

In this, the first post covering content from the 70-411 Administering Windows Server 2012 exam, I’m going to look at deploying & managing server images using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). WDS can be used to automate the deployment of standard or custom images to servers, which can dramatically speed up deployment if you have a significant number to install. Continue reading

Blog: Building a Test Lab – Part 2

In this post, the second of the “Building a Test Lab” series, I’ll run through how to build a virtual machine using VirtualBox. Although this is a relatively straight forward task, there are a few things to bear in mind, such as the size and location of the virtual hard disk (VHD), the amount of RAM you allocate to the virtual machine and what naming convention you should use for your suite of VM’s.

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