Being new to a Mac I was looking for a tool to handle both FTP and Amazon S3. Transmit fit the bill nicely. Check out the link below to read more.
Sometimes automation on a phone makes sense, especially when doing so can help with battery life. Click the link below to check out a post I wrote on Tasker for Android.
I finally got the data migrated to new storage at my organization. The information moved very quickly and went off without a hitch (and minimal yelling/frustration). The one area I found that was not so friendly is the Share Permissions on the destination storage.
I understand that the basic rule of permissions is least privilege, where the most restrictive setting wins. However I apparently missed this idea when configuring the shares where the data would land. As soon as the copy was completed, the email went out to alert the users that the new storage was all set and shortly thereafter, the emails came in that it wasn’t working.
Everyone had readonly access to the newly moved information. Read only is no good. And I proceeded to review all the NTFS permissions and look over all of the items that were copied because there was a problem with the NTFS permissions or how the copy was done (you know, the hard stuff has to be where the problem is).
After several looks at the completed project, and getting nowhere fast, I removed one of the shares using Share and storage manager. The removal was to prevent use of the share while I was troubleshooting the problem. When I decided that it was not the problem and that the read access was ok I rebuilt the share… In the wizard to read the share I found the options for Share permissions.
Then the light bulb went off…
If the Admins group has full control and everyone else has read only access to the share… the read only problem was right out front. The share was disallowing it. Changing these settings got the problem solved right away.
The lesson here is to think simple. Sure you need to think about the NTFS and more complex items as well, but most certainly do not leave out the easy upfront items because they are simple and likely shouldn’t be the problem. Many times these things will bring headaches that are not worth it… just check one more time. Had I looked into that one more time during prep, the entire migration would have been completed with the scheduled job… no weekend work required (by me at least).
Active Directory is a huge environment and infrastructure to manage, regardless of the size of your environment. ManageEngine has put together a great tool to help administrators keep their organizations moving. Check the link below to TechRepublic for the details.
Recently I have been cleaning up some sneaker-net mess at work. You know where the Office application needs to get on the new laptop and loading it from Setup.exe is the first thing that pops in your head. Its comfortable and reliable and sure somewhat time consuming, but it gets the job done.
Instead I have been getting things reloaded with Group Policy deployment(s) and over all have been pretty impressed with the results. However there is a bit of the process that not only makes me chuckle when it appears, but also becomes a bit frustrating. This is more of a Windows 7 frustration, but it was somewhat prevalent in Windows XP as well.
The guilty item? Please Wait…
It happens when the client is loading something via GPO either at boot or at logon. In Windows XP, after a pile of please wait, you might get something like “Installing Managed software Microsoft Bob” to let you know that it was actually doing something.
In Windows 7, the language is Please Wait…, and I waited to see if a notion of the application being installed would appear. Nope. Just the nicely formatted Please Wait…
I know that an extended Please Wait likely means that good things are happening, but a little information would be quite nice. The Windows Update process lets you know what it is up to. From a user’s point of view, seeing nothing more than a Please Wait message is likely to produce questions, both of the “my computer is terribly slow, it takes 2 whole minutes (or whatever time it actually takes plus some) to logon or restart” etc and the “What are you doing to my computer? Is this something I need to worry about” camps.
C’Mon Microsoft
Just a little more information presented to the user for the sake of the IT group would be a huge help. Hopefully someone over there sees this and not only gets a little laugh, but might help to get the language changed.
Because of the popularity of Sysinternals, I discovered a few more of their utilities that were more than useful in my job. This post on TechRepublic highlights a few more Sysinternals utilities.
I decided to republish content I previously contributed over at TechRepublic.com on Saturdays here at Technically Speaking. This serves two purposes, one, it gets me a Saturday post regularly and allows others to see posts I created and two, it helps me keep track of the posts from over there and the posts here all in one place.
They are also listed on the External Articles page, but a feature of these pieces sounded like a great idea too.
There will continue to be new content here, but a mix of other posts never hurt anyone right? The overall template may change to facilitate these posts, but they will appear on Saturdays, enjoy!
Sysinternals has a great set of tools available to make working with Windows easier for administrators. In a post at TechRepublic.com I took a look at some of the utilities available from Sysinternals.
When I attended HP Proliant Days in January I came upon a rather interesting opportunity to test out hosted Exchange. For me this was a no brainer at least to begin with. The chance to see and test Exchange 2010 without the configuration work was a pretty good idea.
Being a new Macintosh owner, I wanted to kick the tires on Outlook 2011 to get a feel for the experience. It has been quite the experience, even though I am still working on it, the interface is very familiar to Outlook 2010.
As for he hosted experience, the general user configuration and feature setup across the stack (Exchange, SharePoint, Spam filtering) was pretty simple.
Hopefully as my schedule frees up shortly, I will get better chances toxic into the hosted platform and get Outlook 2011 working right.
For more info visit:
http://mailstreet.communications-services.com/
I am curious to see what is coming as part of this service in the future and hope that my schedule allows me to continue to dig in to it.
My plans for reviewing/playing around in Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 have been quite up in the air lately, but may finally be coming to fruition, although differently than I originally planned. Since I have installed an EMC Celerra as my organizations primary storage, I thought testing a WSS front end to that system might be appropriate. In a previous post, I was planning to test this in my home lab, but given the considerations I am looking at for my organization, testing there makes loads more sense.
Initially, I was going to create CIFS shares on the EMC and push those out to the users, purely for the ease of use that comes with CIFS. Then I got to thinking, in our previous/current environment the WSS 2003 server is providing much the same access to files and other tools allow for the monitoring of files and folders on the shares.
With this additional monitoring capability, which we already own, and more robust storage on the back end, maybe Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is something to consider. The only caveat here, at least for me, is that once the testing is over and the pony up phase begins, I will not reduce the footprint in the closet because there will need to be an appliance running Storage Server.
Since I am going to test things first using a virtual machine, I will leave the worrying about footprint and power and all of that until I get closer to knowing what makes the most sense. In a decent sized virtual environment, with the right hosts I do think a virtual appliance version of WSS would be a nice thing to consider, but we’ll see how the testing goes.
