For years, my blog sat dormant, a relic of a different era of the internet. The content was still relevant to me, a snapshot of my thoughts and experiences in the tech world from over a decade ago. However, the format was outdated, a mix of inconsistent markdown, old HTML elements, and front matter that didn’t quite fit modern static site generators like Hugo, which I’ve since adopted. Manually going through dozens of posts, fixing front matter, converting HTML links and entities, and ensuring consistent markdown syntax felt like a daunting and tedious task.

So the latest version of the Windows 10 tech preview is out and it is pretty snazzy! Being the daredevil rouge that I am I decided to try it out on my work laptop (being the only Windows PC I have) and have had great success. While I wanted to try it out I didn’t want to chance destroying all my data and I also wanted an easy back out if I didn’t like it.

Sorry all for the lack of posts, I’ve been lazybusy. But as you can see the site has had a new lick of paint but that is a whole different series posts. Instead I want to talk about my new NAS. Being the data conscious person that I am there is only one acceptable filesystem to use, ZFS. Thankfully there is also a nice appliance-like OS called FreeNAS that is based on FreeBSD and has ZFS as the foundation.

Damien Flynn has a good article on Petri about using System Centre Update Publisher (SCUP) to deploy the SCCM client with WSUS. Damien Flynn follows up with part two of expanding WSUS. Kristian Nese has a useful blog post on how to deploy SOFS using SCVMM. Lai Yoong Seng has a post about creating a Linux VM template for Hyper-V. This is a handy one, if you’ve noticed the difference between Task Manager on Windows 8 vs Server 2012 with missing disk graphs then Hans Vredevoort has the details on how to bring them back.

Chris M Evans over at ArchitectingIT has a good post on why he doesn’t want to see a ten year old flash array. I honestly don’t think to many organisations really keep ancient arrays around as their primary storage array, the support costs alone would be astronomical. Speaking of flash, the VMware vSphere blog has a useful post on VSAN hardware guidance with SSDs. I’ve linked to the first part in the series.

With all the brouhaha about VSAN (and I admit I’m looking very hard at it and how much it would cost to get a nice home lab setup) the requirement for one SSD per disk group should show the importance of SSD reliability. If you plan on using consumer grade SSDs or SSDs not from your hardware OEM (and even then) you are going to want to test them, hard.

Jeff Wouters has a handy script to find empty Active Directory groups. Another good one from Jeff Wouters, this time to find the users in the “authoritative groups”. I believe the authoritative groups Jeff is referencing are the BUILTIN groups. If you are looking to play tricks on your coworkers or have a legitimate reason to eject the CD-ROM drive, PowerShell Magazine have you covered. Jeffery Hicks at The Lonely Administrator has posted the PowerShell scripts he uses to clean out his TEMP files.

One to look out for those of you with IIS based websites, Update decreases the page load time of web sites that are hosted on Windows 7-based and Windows Server 2008 R2-based web servers. I’m sure we’ve all see the trust relationship error with Windows computers however KB 2914472 details that this can be caused by an IIS issue. A hotfix is referenced. For you Hyper-V and SCOM users (though I suppose if you use Hyper-V you have to use SCOM) there is a new version of the Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions for R2.

For all you SOE creators out there, you might find this post from Henk Hoogendoorn useful as he provides links to driver packages from Dell, HP and Lenovo. Should come in quite handy if you are using MDT/SCCM. I’ve been fighting with UEFI and WDS as of late so I know the pain of trying to get it going. If you are working with a device with no KVM you might want to look out for this bug with WDS 2012, UEFI-based computers cannot start because the WDS PXE program requires you to press F12.

Good news everyone! F5 have dropped the price of their LTM VE lab editions to approx. USD$95. Here in Australia the going rate was about AUD$2000 so this represents a significant saving. With this price it is worth adding these VMs to your lab and I look forward to trying out NSX with these new VEs when I’m able to get ahold of NSX. I’ve bought two to test failover but I’m still waiting on my license keys.