Forget using scripts and group policies to configure a new Windows Server machine. Using Chocolatey and Puppet, you can do it faster & easier than ever (and it’s more fun too). This is especially true if you’re using a Server Core installation and don’t have a GUI to help you along. Oh, and if you don’t know …

Years ago when I was active on twitter, I made a few passing observations about this strange place called Twitter:

1. “A lot of people follow me for a few days then unfollow me if I don’t follow them back”

There are so many things wrong with this. Following someone just so they’ll follow you back is selfish. It’s pretty …

I recently ran into a bizarre issue with users not being able to launch applications from a very old Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 farm when trying to launch from Citrix Web Interface 5.4. They were getting the eminently unhelpful, “An error occurred while making the requested connection.”

The Diagnosis

In the web …

One of the biggest scams of the Internet is in full swing right now. You may have heard of it. It’s called “net neutrality.”

Fundamentally, net neutrality is about preventing Internet service providers (ISPs) from throttling or blocking traffic or providing paid prioritization of certain content. In addition, specific …

IT people often intentionally withhold knowledge from those outside of IT. There are different reasons for this — some good and some very bad.

One reason IT folks withhold knowledge is that they believe the best way to learn is to teach yourself. After all, that’s how many of them learned. Unlike many others in …

Where is SSMS 2012?

Microsoft decided to make it confusing and difficult to install SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2012. Since my slogan is, “Business at the speed of light,” I’m going to to show you the quickest way I’ve found to install SSMS 2012.

Recently I had an Oracle database server used by some developers that was running out of space on its data volume mounted at /u02. The volume was a simple MBR volume (think fdisk), so it couldn’t be non-destructively extended without using a third-party utility like gparted. That would have been fine, but rather than …

In this demonstration, we’re going to configure a basic OpenStack cluster on RedHat/CentOS 6.5.

Recently I needed to build a multipurpose file server to host CIFS and NFS shares — CIFS for the Windows users, and NFS for VMWare to store ISOs. It needed to utilize back end storage (NetApp via iSCSI), provide Windows ACLs for the CIFS shares, and be able to authenticate against two different Active Directory …

How to Configure Server Core with Active Directory Services, DNS, and DHCP Using Nothing But PowerShell

Windows Server 2012 offers two installation options: Server Core or “Server with a GUI”. This begs the question: Why would you want to install Server Core instead of the GUI? One reason may be that you have limited …