This one was a lot of fun and by “fun”, I mean a complete pain. Recently, several of my helpdesk calls have been along the lines of “When I open Word, it says that it needs activating”. As I’d hope most people with more than 20 PCs to manage do, we use a Key Management …
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DCM Script – Detect if a Mac is a Domain Member and Join if not
As I’ve said before, Macs can be a pain in the backside when you’re trying to manage a lot of them. One of the particular bugbears that I’ve found is that they have a habit of unbinding themselves from your Active Directory domain for no apparent reason. Usually this would mean a helpdesk call because …
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Merry Belated Christmas
Well, Merry Christmas I guess. This has been a bit of a strange one for me. For starters, I’ve been sick with the flu for a good chunk of it and really have only started to feel myself again now. The other strange thing about is that I think that this is the first time …
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Controlling Dual Monitor Modes with the Command Line
This one is absurdly simple but pretty useful nevertheless. At work, we have been getting a lot of calls recently where the teacher has complained that their interactive whiteboards aren’t working properly and all that they can see on the projected surface is their wallpaper. I’m sure that anyone who has experience with this things will …
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DCM Script – Detect and Disable Intel Graphics Card Service
As I imagine the majority of corporate PCs do these days, all of the computers at my workplace have integrated Intel graphics chipsets. And why not, for a business PC they’re perfectly adequate; their 3D acceleration is good enough for Aero on Windows 7 and for anything else the vast majority of users need. However, …
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Mac Servers – What I’m Doing
Hopefully this should be the last post about Macs for the time being! I don’t know why I’ve written so many recently, I guess it’s just because the bloody things take up so much of my time at work. Don’t get me wrong, I like Macs a lot for my own purposes. I own two, …
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Mac Servers in a Post X-Serve World
About three years ago, Apple discontinued the Xserve line of servers. This presented a problem. While the Xserve never was top tier hardware, it was at least designed to go into a server room; you could rack mount it, it had proper ILO and it had redundant power supplies. You would never run an Apache …
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Ian’s Pasta Sauce Recipe
Right, I’m going to try to write about something other than bloody computers for once and share a recipe for a pasta sauce that I think I’m quite good at. I think that it’s classed as a ragout, I’m hesitant to call it a Bolognese as it has whole tomatoes in it rather than tomato puree and …
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Managing Macs using System Center Configuration Manager – Part 2
In my previous article, I described the agent that Microsoft have put into System Center Configuration Manager to manage Macs with. Overall, while I was happy to have some kind of management facility for our Macs I found it to be somewhat inadequate for our needs and I wished it was better. I also mentioned that …
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Automating SC-VMM Patching
Patching. What a pain in the backside it is. It’s bad enough when you just have to look after one or two machines at home. When you have thousands of the things to look after, it can be horrific. A recent brace of high level, out of band Microsoft security updates has forced me to take a …
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