• New versions of the Dell iDRAC have a feature to auto-lock the OS when the last virtual console has disconnected. I think this is pretty useful and I’d like something like this inside VMware but it is obviously more important for physical servers.

• John Allspaw at the Kitchen Soap blog has a really great post on being a senior engineer. This is one of those articles that I think everyone should read. I hope to live up to what is described in that post.

• Seems there is a bit of a change in the way mailbox sizes are calculated in Exchange 2013. You can read a good argument on why it isn’t a big issue from Tony at Windows IT Pro. To me it is only a non-issue if the numbers in Outlook match up. If users find they’ve suddenly lost quota they tend to get pretty annoyed!

• Having upgraded to Windows 8.1 it is very clear Microsoft want you to have a Microsoft Account. This isn’t that bad and can provide some nice features however they seem to be doing this at the expense of corporate identities. The true power Microsoft are trying to gain is over your data. In light of this the SBS Diva Blog (R.I.P SBS) has a post on how to disable the Microsoft account using GPO.

• I usually shy away from vendor battles as the technology should speak for itself but sometimes the FUD from vendors can be a bit much. Jamie Doherty at the Bits and Bytes blog takes down a recent HP video for OneView. Vendors shouldn’t purposefully misuse competitors products in a video on the *Internet,*it isn’t really a good look.

• Kevin Houston over at Blades Made Simple has a great comparison of the maximum number of 10GbE network cards for 2x socket servers in various blade vendors’ chassis. Just a note on the UCS one, I’ve heard that 40GbE is on its way. That is a lot of network in a single chassis!

This post is less of a tip and more of a general warning. As someone who does a fair bit of work with PowerShell, I’m always anxious to get my hands on the latest release. But this is a caution to really read the release notes as it turns out new PowerShell versions are quite incompatible with a fair few core Microsoft technologies (e.g. Exchange). This is very unfortunate and has been the case since PowerShell/WMF 3.

• It seems Kaspersky Anti-Virus is identifying tcpip.sys as malware. How can this be happening in 2013? This issue has been going on since AV was introduced and yet there has been no movement. Very sad.

• Every time an AV issue like this one crops up I feel the need to post this article by the SANS Computer Forensics blog. I feel that at this point AV simply checks a box and provides no real protection against anything but the lowest and most common threats.