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Words Matter
One of my biggest pet peeves with AI is the word itself. Words matter, especially in IT. Whether you’re trying to nail down a scope of work for a project, troubleshooting an outage, or even trying to buy a product, if everyone isn’t using the same terminology, you’re headed for trouble. You could even potentially be headed…
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SysAdmin Day 2021: You Are Enough
A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post with the words, “I’m not going to even try to pretend SysAdmin Day arrives this year under conditions anyone would call ‘business as usual.’” Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The…
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IT Pro Day ’21: Bring IT On
IT Pro Day has always been about singing the praises of practitioners across the vast spectrum of tech specialties, from network engineers and systems administrators; to infosec analysts and developers; to storage and virtualization admins; and even to monitoring specialists (whether that’s your whole job or just part of a…
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Troubleshooting Hardware Health in SAM
SAM monitors hardware by polling nodes and utilizing the Hardware Monitoring Agent software provided by the hardware manufacturer. SAM can monitor hardware from VMware hosts, HP ProLiant, Dell PowerEdge, and the IBM X-Series using this software. Hardware monitoring is achieved by polling via SNMP or WMI, depending upon the…
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Finding Zen in Tedium
As often happens, I was recently talking about my son and his attitude regarding chores. Doing the thing parents do, commiserating and getting advice from another parent who’s been through it, Leon shared what his family does for chores. As you may know, the two of us are talkers…. which means this led to a whole…
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Monitoring Video Traffic to Support VTC
Within the government, particularly the U.S. Defense Department, video traffic—more specifically videoconference calling—often is considered mission critical. The Defense Department uses video for a broad range of communications. One of the most critical uses is video teleconference (VTC) inside and outside of the United…
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Time Is on My Side – With a Raspberry Time Server
I don’t like warnings in log files. Even if there’s no real impact—I guess it’s kind of an OCD thing. IT-OCD. I just invented it. I see something in yellow or red, I want to fix it. I have to. MUST…FIX… You know what bugged me for ages? Time sync-related errors and warnings, primarily on my Domain Controllers. Event ID 129…
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How Can the Public Sector Get Remote Working Right?
Mobile working is becoming the reality for an increasing number of public sector staff. But the threat and impact brought by the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak has seen many organizations instructing office-based employees to work remotely, as a way to minimize the risk of infection and spreading of the virus. An increasing…
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Hey, [Insert Family/Friend Name Here], Let’s Talk About Online Security
2020 keeps on proving the old adage, “It gets worse before it gets better.” We still seem to be in the “worse” stage. If you’ve been paying attention to the news—and I don’t blame you if you’ve been taking a break for sanity’s sake—you might have noticed (in addition to the reports about the pandemic and social issues)…
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You Have to EARN the Gorilla Suit
There’s an old joke that goes something like this: back in the days of vaudeville, comedy acts were all the rage. This young guy wants to get into the business, but he’s not sure his act is good enough. He knows all the great comedians of the time would put on a gorilla suit, and the audience ate it up. So the first time…