Category: Tech
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Eighteen Months (and more) Later: Life with Nest
Due to what’s probably the collision of boundary-pushing architecture and city fire codes, I had some less than great experiences with smoke detectors in the condo I lived in before I got the house. The smoke detectors in the bedroom and hallway (which was right off a bathroom) went off whenever I so much as…
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Pro Tip: Force HTTPS in IIS7
I recently ran into a situation the other day where a vendor requested that traffic from visitors be required to use HTTPS. Since most users don’t make a habit of knowing when (or that they have to) type https: in the browser to establish a secure connection, this seemed like a logical enough request. My…
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Tech Tip: Importing VMs for ESXi
One of the things I love about VMware and virtual machines is the ability to move them between servers with almost no effort. Last week I was working importing some virtual machines to a new host that had been shipped to us, and after uploading the VMs to the datastore and adding the machines to…
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Tech Tip: Exporting Mailboxes in Exchange 2010 SP1
The whole mailbox export thing for Exchange has come a long way since Exchange 2003. 2003 had ExMerge, and Exchange 2007 through 2010 RTM had the Export-Mailbox command in the Exchange Management Shell. I liked the whole management shell thing well enough, but having to install the management tools and Outlook to do mailbox exports…
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Tech Tip: Optimus
One of the fancy “new” features on my Latitude E6420 that I got a month or so ago was an nVidia technology called Optimus, which can help save battery life by reverting to onboard Intel graphics if applications don’t need the high graphics bandwidth the dedicated GPU can provide. I say “new” because this is…
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Time Machine Adventures
I’ve got a WD MyBook World Edition II that I’ve been using as a place to keep my iTunes in a nice, safe RAID 1 environment. After moving my iTunes library from my standalone 1TB disk to the NAS, I had a spare disk and wanted to put it to some good use, so I…
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Mozy Madness
We use MozyPro as an inexpensive online backup solution for some of our customers at work to provide them with either a low-cost way to back up their data or as an inexpensive offsite backup solution to complement their existing backup solution. Recently though I’ve had a bone to pick with Mozy. Mozy’s a great…
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VMware ESXi: Datastore Delights
Earlier this week I was working on an ESXi VM host that had a huge (4TB) amount of local storage. Ideally, I would have liked to provision a single datastore on the server, but as I found out, this isn’t possible; ESXi supports datastore sizes up to 2TB, but no higher. The odd thing about…
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Resetting ESXi Root Passwords
I was recently playing around with VMware’s ESXi hypervisor a few days ago on a lab server when I forgot the password. Happens to the best of us. While the VMs on the server continued running as if nothing was wrong, this was obviously a problem becuase I couldn’t properly shut down, reboot, or update…