Brent Pabst

Dell Precision M6500 Server

Brent Pabst — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:06:00 GMT

I just took delivery of my new work/personal laptop this past week and spent a few days getting it setup just right. For some background and for those of you who think I am crazy here were my requirements:

Must be a laptop, need to travel and for school
I like to develop, needs to be fast
I like to be creative, needs some graphics and CPU power
I like to play with new software and server stuff, needs a Hypervisor
I like docking stations too!

So with all of that said I bought a Dell M6500, you can take a look at the base specs at the Dell site, but trust me, don’t buy this monster without working with a Business Sales Rep!

I ended up getting the following:

Intel i7 890xm CPU
12GB 1333 GHz RAM
nVidia 3800m (1GB Ded)
Dual 500GB HDD in RAID0
Docking Station of course!
The others goodies Dell has to offer

I had a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 laying around and that is how this post starts…

If you read the comments about the 6500 many people complain about attempting to convert the laptop into a server and run into problems when running Hyper-V on the laptop. Dell obviously does not support running a server OS on a laptop but there are lots of resources out there.

When I first went away to college I did run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop because I wanted to learn more about IIS6 at the time as well as beginning my foray into ASP development at the time. Back then getting a server OS running as a workstation was HARD to say the least. It never worked quite right and programs always picked up on it being a server and not a client so needless to say I eventually moved back to XP at the time.

I had faith in Microsoft and thought I would give 2008 R2 a chance, surely they had made some improvements.

I was right! I was able to setup 2008 R2 and so far everything has worked great. I have the desktop experience features installed which makes working with the OS a little nicer. There are a few gotchas but I managed to find a great website complete with automated installers to help out with a lot of the problems. You can find it here.

So far the experience has been great and I have been lucky enough not to run into the problem many users have talked about where the laptop will lock up when the Hypervisor is running. No BSODs here!

Feel free to post questions or comments, I’ll try to answer back as quickly as possible.

-Brent

Traveling on Business–The First Time

Brent Pabst — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 04:47:00 GMT

One thing that is often a bit scary is traveling for business for the first time. I don’t mean driving to a customer in town but rather flying to someplace outside of your comfort zone with people you don’t know and meeting people who you surely don’t know. Hopefully this post will provide some help and advice on how to keep it all together and what to expect on your journey the first time around.

1. Planning for your trip is very important. Spending the time ensuring your reservations are all ready or working with your office designated travel person to work it all out is the first important thing you should do at least two weeks out. If something goes wrong or comes up it could take two weeks to straighten it all out. Of course there will always be last minute travels but getting into a routine when traveling can help you when time is not on your side.

2. Packing, if you leave in the morning make sure everything is packed the night before, nothing hurts more than trying to get stuff ready in the morning when you are still waking up. Just stay up an hour later and you will be ready to roll out of bed and into the airport. Make sure you bring a copy of every reservation and confirmation printed out with you. If something goes wrong anywhere along the line you have the documentation you might need to prove your point.

3. Be a Frequent Flyer, this doesn’t mean you need to fly all of the time but make sure you get enrolled in the most used airline at your company or the one you fly with most, then make sure you enroll with the rental car company and the hotel. Most hotels and rental car companies can transfer points/nights to your airline to help you build up miles faster. From my experience getting elite or whatever status with an airline has far more benefits than status with hotels or rental car companies. It helps you earn free trips later, free upgrades, etc.

4. Be Comfortable. If you are lucky enough to fly out the night before you start working wear comfortable clothes. This is great for longer flights and when going through airport security and you have to practically undress.

5. Know the Rules. Be a good citizen, when you get to the airport know the rules of the road. If you are doing an overnight make sure your overnight bag has everything packed according to TSA specs, if staying longer, why not check? (More on that later) Remember a few simple rules:

Jackets, Coats, etc. all go through the scanner, put them in a bucket on their own.
Take your shoes off, put them in a bucket or send them through on their own, its ok!
Your big bags and backpacks don’t need a bucket it takes way too long!
Your laptop has to go through on its own take it out and put it in its own bucket.
I usually put my wallet, cell phone, watch, coins, etc. in my backpack before I send it through the scanner. That way its secure in my bag and its easy to deal with later.

6. Be Polite. Delays happen all the time in air travel, many because of weather but regardless you are most likely to sit in the airport on the way out or back home. Being angry and upset does not help the situation. The gate agents are already frustrated because of the overload and having another angry passenger doesn’t help. In fact if you are in need of help its easier to get that help if you are polite and understanding. Tell the agent to take their time even if you don’t have time they will end up working faster if they feel relaxed. Your politeness should extend until you return home, be nice to the flight attendants and always thank the cabin crew when you disembark, its just the right thing to do. After all they did get you home safely.

7. Get Sleep! When you travel, especially when meeting with customers being fresh and ready to go is important. Even though anyone under 25 may still remember the days of partying all night long you simply won’t last doing it here. Make sure you get enough sleep, get up early enough for at least a light breakfast and then head off to work.

8. Rental Cars. This is usually a big problem for anyone under 25. Every car company will charge you a fee for driving under that age. It has to do with the fact that most people in that age group are much more prone to having an accident. When you get to the car counter act professional and the staff will think you are. It all goes back to number six above. Make sure you have a credit card to use for the car, make sure you keep your proof of insurance for your regular car with you as most extend to rental cars for a few days. If you are in a big city like New York or Los Angeles always ask for the GPS option, it will save you in certain situations. Also ask for EZPass or the electronic toll plate system in the area if they have them, it saves a lot of time and traffic in some situations. Find a gas place close to the return location or within a certain distance because you will be expected to return a full tank. Overall treat the car just like your own, that would be a heck of a bill to walk away with if you damaged the car.

9. Phone Home. Make sure you call home when you get back to the hotel at night. By doing so you tell your girlfriend/wife/parents that you are still alive and safe at the hotel. Plus since you may be all by yourself in the room some human interaction is always a good thing.

10. After your home. When you get home the first thing you should do is handle the paperwork your little excursion has generated. File your expenses as soon as all of the bills are available. Some companies will not reimburse after a certain time period. Also make sure if the company paid for the car, hotel or airfare you get them the receipts. You don’t want to be on the bad side of the people who helped setup and plan your trip as they may not be so willing to help next time.

Note on checked bags:

Historically checking your bag has not been a good thing as bags are lost, damaged, etc. However as some may know checked bags are now charged an additional fee which has some inclined to take giant bags through security. The lines to check bags are relatively short and since there are less bags being checked theoretically your odds of loosing your bag are actually higher. However, from my experience two things happen. First checking your bag is not a big deal unless you are connecting somewhere for another flight, especially if that connection is missed or delayed, so plan for that. However if you are flying directly or have a connection with a big layover checking a bag seems to work pretty well and gives you one less thing to have to worry about. Plus with the airline status you will be earning some bag fees are waived at certain levels. In addition the line has become huge in the jet way where everyone who decided to bring their bag in the cabin is waiting because there is physically not enough room in the overhead bins for all of the giant roller bags, so instead they are gate checked where there is absolutely no identification placed on the bag other than what you put on it. At least with a checked bag the durable airline tags are applied with lots of identifiable information.

So there it is my top ten things to keep in mind while traveling. Please send in any comments or disagreements. Just remember this post is focused for those new to the work force who will be lucky enough to travel at an early age.

See you at Terminal 1 in RDU!

-Brent

del.icio.us Tags: Travel,Business Travel,First Time Traveler

Changing Directions

Brent Pabst — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:00:00 GMT

I have decided to change the direction of this blog so that I might update it more often. With everything that is going on now a days I want to make sure I start to record two types of things:

Technology Stuff across the board
Business Stuff

I am really kind of excited about doing the second part because I honestly have to say I got lucky when I started working in a “real job” because it was a start-up company with lots of learning opportunities. I have continued to work in companies with lots of learning and life experiences available for the taking. I hope I can share some of them as well as put out some of my opinions about how to be successful as someone who is new to the business world or for those who have been around for a while but want a fresh look at things, hopefully I can do that.

Of course I will push myself to keep this thing updated with all of the current technology stuff and problems I run across on a daily basis as a point for putting more content out on the interwebs for everyone’s benefit.

I also plan to refresh some of the other content pages on this thing and improving the theme a bit to match me a little better, but one baby step at a time!

That’s it for now but I plan to write the first update this weekend, so lets see where it takes us.

-Brent

Top 10 Must-Have Skills for IT Pros

Brent Pabst — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:42:00 GMT

I received this list from a family member and is perfect for use in any company or organization:

Randy Muller, Global Knowledge Instructor

There are many skills that IT Pros should know about in doing their day-to-day jobs. That is one of great benefits of being in the IT industry - learning new platforms and products as they are released. The following list has many of the most common ones that most IT Pros should have. While there are ten skills listed, they are not in an ordered ranking. Depending upon the size of the IT infrastructure and environment, some of these might not be applicable.

1. Troubleshooting

Is this a skill, an art, or both? If you ask any seasoned IT professionals, they will tell you that troubleshooting skills are important, very important - and not something that can be readily taught. The difficult part is that troubleshooting is a specific skill set that many corporations simply do not have the time or money to invest. Troubleshooting skills could make or break your career. Not having the required troubleshooting skills could become a RGE (resuming generating event), or it could become a career enhancer when you are able to fix a mission-critical server. All of this being said, one would think that there would be more emphasis on teaching and sharing troubleshooting skills; unfortunately, this is not the case. This is one skill that must be learned only after mastering a particular platform or program.

2. PowerShell and Scripting

No, you don't have to be a programmer to be a successful network engineer (or vice-versa for that matter), but you do have to know PowerShell. More platforms from Microsoft (Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 have some features that can ONLY be implemented with PowerShell) are managed through PowerShell - including the recently released SharePoint 2010. Being able to script many day-to-day tasks will make more time available for proactive tasks.

3. Networking and Interoperability

Interoperability is the key to networking. We live in a highly connected world, a world of disparate platforms. Networking is understanding how to make these platforms communicate. As an IT Pro (and this includes programmers to a certain extent), you must understand the communications protocols, OSI Model layers, and connectivity required for systems to communicate. This also includes understanding connecting and securing wireless networks. This is one skill that is common to almost all IT Pros, whether they are programmers, security personnel, auditors or the help desk personnel.

4. Virtualization

It doesn't matter which Virtualization technology you use (Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware, or even Sun's VirtualBox), it is the use that is important. Virtualization is being adopted by companies of all sizes as a means to reduce costs through consolidation of servers and lower cooling requirements. Application Virtualization has become very popular with businesses. Having the skill set to deploy applications that connect securely through a browser is critical for companies that have numerous offices.

Virtualization can aid in near real-time response to network conditions by providing for more disaster recovery capabilities. Another interesting area of virtualization is through the use of desktop virtualization. This involved configuring and maintaining the virtual environment whereby users can connect to their own virtual desktop remotely or through the web. Another use for virtualization is for improved instruction for IT education and elsewhere, since there is no longer a need to have large numbers of computers for classrooms.

5. Wireless

As part of our highly connected world, we expect to able to connect wirelessly from almost anywhere at any time. Those IT Pros who can install, configure, and maintain secure wireless networks have a skill that is in high demand. The key word here is secure wireless network. IT Pros with this skill set are in high demand as we expect to be able to securely connect to wireless networks in almost all locations at any time. Implementing a secure wireless environment also means being able to plan and troubleshoot interferences as well. Anyone managing wireless environments must be able to handle the calls that come in from remote users who are having problems with their wireless equipment, and different operating systems capabilities and limitations.

6. Disaster Recovery

This is as much a methodology as a skill set. IT Pros must be able plan, test, and implement a disaster recovery (DR) plan. This is critical for the survivability of a data center or network. One of the hardest tasks is being able to test disaster recovery plans. There is hardly enough time available to perform the critical tasks that need to get done while adding a yearly or semi-yearly test of the DR plan. An integral part of the disaster recovery process is implementing fault-tolerant systems and providing for redundancy in your network.

7. Security

All IT Pros must have a good understanding of both physical and electronic security. One of the most difficult tasks with IT security is educating users. Company information can be gleaned through social engineering that most companies would rather not have divulged. Training users (and IT staff) to be cognizant of and prevent social engineering is extremely difficult. IT Pros must always be aware of security issues and understand the vulnerabilities within their networks (from operating systems, servers to the lowly cable closet). This does not mean that every IT Pro must be able to perform a penetration test against his or her own network, but they must understand and prevent attacks against their network.

8. Database Administration

Corporations retain more information than ever before and are quite dependent on their databases. Regulatory compliance has had a huge impact on database management and data retention. Corporations are required to retain information for a number of years and, in some cases, emails as well. Storage space and solutions have become much cheaper, so there is more emphasis on data retention. Having the ability to create and extract information from one of these databases is critical. Many IT Projects use a SQL backend, Archiving information from Microsoft's Office Communication Server requires a SQL backend. If you are going to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), this will require a SQL backend. IT Pros these days do not need to be DBAs, but they must be able to administer and maintain these servers. There are several database systems commonly used: SQL, Oracle, and MySQL.

9. Desktop Imaging

Imaging of desktop systems is a critical skill as companies are shifting to standardized desktops and deployments. Part of this is done to deploy a consistent and secure platform as well as to provide ease of management. There are many imaging programs available, as well as Microsoft's Windows Deployment Services and imaging utilities.

10. Helpdesk (People Skills)

One of the most critical skills that IT Pros need to learn is how to interact with non-technical people. The Help Desk is the first interaction most users have with the IT department, and it should be a positive experience. IT Pros are very good at their jobs, but sometimes lack the ability to relate to their non-tech colleagues. Users just want their computers fixed or their data recovered; they are not concerned with the processes behind our actions. IT Pros should have some experience working at the Help Desk.

These are some of the most important skills that an IT Pro should know. If you don't know some of these areas, now is the time to learn them. One thing to keep in mind is that you are your own best career manager! You are the only one who can decide where you want to head your career.

del.icio.us Tags: IT,Skills,Work Skills

uManage – Active Directory Self-Service Portal v1.2

Brent Pabst — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:59:00 GMT

Just published out version 1.2 of uManage. It now includes a little more automated setup process as well as the new Admin Portal which as of right now only allows the system administrator to view and change some system settings. The next release (~ 1.5) will really have a lot of the new functionality that will start to make the product really usable in an organization for managing users. I got a request from one of the previous releases for some screenshots. I added more to CodePlex and will include them here as well. If you have an Active Directory test environment the app takes less than 10 minutes to have up and running, so just give it a shot, worst comes to worse and you remove it.

Check it out now: http://umanage.codeplex.com

Check back here for more in the future!

-Brent

del.icio.us Tags: active Directory,windows,uManage

uManage v1.1 Released

Brent Pabst — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:41:00 GMT

Well, it has been a busy week but I managed to find a few hours to update uManage to include a setup wizard as well as fix the first issue. For those who just want to download it visit Codeplex.

The setup wizard was always in the master plan to make it easy to setup the application as well as in the future allow IT Pro’s who may not know much about ASP.NET to simply download the application as part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer. So essentially, once downloaded IIS and the File System would already be configured and simply need someone to run through the wizard to configure everything else. Pretty simple I think.

In addition the first issue fix was included. Of course I was the one that logged it but nonetheless it was important. In Version 1.0 the membership section was not encrypted which meant that the username and password could potentially be read by anyone who has access to the file system and possibly not to the domain. They could be employees or potential hackers who want to cause problems. Either way when the setup wizard is run it encrypts the membership provider section which makes it pretty hard to get to the username and password for the application.

Of course anyone who uses this application really should create a new user account that has delegated rights to mitigate any major security problems. I will have a new post soon on how to set all of that up as I have a feeling the developers out there might not know what that is all about. Security is still important people!

Well off to pack for a trip, but check back soon for updates.

-Brent

del.icio.us Tags: Active Directory,ASP.NET,uManage,CodePlex,User Portal

uManage – Active Directory Self-Service Portal

Brent Pabst — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:06:00 GMT

Well, over the past week or so I have been working on a new ASP.NET web application. It really served two or three purposes for me. One was to brush up on Active Directory programming which is really not that much fun, but is still required in most enterprise programming scenarios simply because it is usually readily available for SSO type services for applications. The second which was way more fun was to get more familiar with Visual Studio 2010 and in particular the .NET 4.0 framework. A lot of the new ASP.NET features are well needed and deserved in my opinion but that is a whole other post on its own. The last reason to do this was really the fact that I could not find a self-service style portal available on the internet for free or that was a regular website and not some SharePoint implementation. So I wrote my own!

The initial plan was simply to create a website that allows users to access the site and update their personal information like telephone numbers to take the burden off of IT and HR to have to add the information. Of course not to pawn off any more work from IT to HR but the next logical step is to create an HR dashboard in the system that allows help desk techs and HR to create new employees in the system or even to disable and delete employees from the system. After all HR already enters employees into Payroll, benefits, and god knows what else. At least now the information can be stored in AD and potentially be usable by other applications. The current implementation does not implement a lot of the hidden attributes like Assistant, Employee ID, Badge Number, etc. but depending on feedback they can easily be added.

The best part about all of this is that Administrators still have full control over how users are created, which OU’s they should be added to, etc. In the future I want to integrate Exchange support as well so that it really is a seamless process for creating users. Worst case scenario the System Administrator’s job is a little easier.

The project is hosted on CodePlex and is available under the Ms-PL license which is an OSI compliant license so its really a benefit to all. Did I mention it’s free?

That’s all for now!

-Brent

del.icio.us Tags: Active Directory,Windows Server,ASP.NET,.NET 4.0

Cancer in the Family

Brent Pabst — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:49:00 GMT

OK,

So here is the long awaited update. We have had a few major things hit our family pretty hard right here at the end of the year and it looks like 2010 will be a long rough year as well. I figured the best way to convey what has happened is by letting my dad tell the story which he did through an email to our close family and friends:

Beth had surgery for a subcutaneous cyst Monday before Christmas. Late Wednesday the surgeon called and informed us it was not a cyst. It was a B-Cell Lymphoma ( http://www.lymphomainfo.net/nhl/b-cell.html ). The tumor was slightly smaller than a golf ball.

On the positive side, with Beth working on the Oncology/Orthopedics floor at Wake Med she was able to reach out to an Oncologist she is most impressed with. They chatted Saturday morning and he said it was fine to make our trip to Baltimore to be with family.

We went to Baltimore; but by Sunday morning Beth was having extreme difficulty breathing. We had to have EMS take her to Carroll County Hospital Center in Westminster, MD.

To make a long story short, she has blood clots in both her lungs and in her left leg (Bi-Lateral Pulmonary Embolism and a Deep Vein Thrombosis in the lower left extremity). They are pumping her full of Heparin to dissolve the clots and thin her blood. There are multiple possible reasons for the clots including a downstream effect from the Lymphoma. However, no one seems sure how we got where we are and they are just trying to get her blood and pulmonary function back to a therapeutic level. That is a good thing because she could not walk 10 feet before she was totally out of breath and her heart rate spiking.

So with that being said it is now New Years Day and she has still not been released from the hospital. We are currently expecting her to be released sometime early next week. Once she returns we begin to meet with oncologists and others to figure out exactly what to do next. In the mean time we appreciate all of the thoughts, prayers and help from all of our friends and family.

-Brent

del.icio.us Tags: Cancer,Lymphoma,DVT,Embolism,Hospital,Westminster

Windows Network Error 1054 or Negative Ping Times with Hyper-V Hosted Machines

Brent Pabst — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:05:00 GMT

I ran into this problem recently with a Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 machine hosted in a Hyper-V environment where repeated 1054 errors are logged on the client machine. At first in my research I found that this is an old problem originally reported with AMD Opteron CPUs with multiple cores. (http://blogs.technet.com/perfguru/archive/2008/02/18/explanation-for-the-usepmtimer-switch-in-the-boot-ini.aspx). It all stems from a problem where Windows was not properly counting CPU cycles on dual or multi-core systems. Many times this problem is found with Negative Ping times where the initial time for a ping request may come from CPU Core A and after the request is made the time stamp may come from CPU Core B. The problem though is that the time from CPU Core B was less than the original time returned from CPU Core A thus the negative ping time and in the end the request would fail as Windows could not handle the negative ping time return.

Theoretically this problem was fixed with a patch from AMD and SP2 of Windows Server 2003 however I am not sure why this problem has resurfaced. The apparent problem arises in the Hyper-V environment because Hyper-V provides a pool of CPUs to the virtual machines to use. So it is possible that even though the server uses a single CPU core it still is load balanced among the entire pool of CPUs by the Hyper-V Hypervisor and therefore the CPU clock can still return a bad time stamp.

The problem only appears from what I can see to reproduce itself in Windows Server 2003 and R2. With that being said it is a very easy fix, there is even a Microsoft KB article for a step by step procedure. However you can simply do the following:

Edit the Boot.ini file
Add the Load Operator “/usepmtimer”
Verify the edit by running “cmd bootcfg”
Restart the machine
All is well!

If you want more info from Microsoft see the KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895980

Additional References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tvoellm/archive/2008/06/05/negative-ping-times-in-windows-vm-s-whats-up.aspx

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?forumID=75&threadID=93813&tstart=60

-Brent

del.icio.us Tags: Windows,Hyper-V,PMTimer,AMD,Opteron,Windows R2

Because I Live in New Jersey

Brent Pabst — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:17:00 GMT

Had to get this clip from Mercy on NBC. The best lines about beloved NJ:

Thank you Hulu!

Brent