OWSUG.ca

September 2008 - Posts

• My Antivirus Scheduled Scans post was picked up by Tech Republic!

  To me, getting published by Tech Republic is a huge deal.  Last year, I stopped working full time as a Windows System Analyst to work for myself as an independent contractor. This exposure for me is HUGE!  See the post at the link below: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=60 Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 3:43 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Optical drive not detected on Dell laptop when Hot-Swapped from Modular Bay

  While I was working on upgrading my laptop, I put the DVD/RW drive back in and Windows would not detect it properly.  It saw the drive in Device Manager along with the Virtual Drive which gets mounted with Magic ISO. I shut the laptop down and verified Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 5:55 AM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Need to Re-Install reporting in OpsMgr 2007? Read this first!

  Uninstalling Operations Manager Reporting is relatively simple, you do it through Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.  There is a little more to it though... Firstly:  Take note of the Application Pool settings for the ReportServer and Read More... Posted Monday, September 29, 2008 8:51 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Mad Scientist fever, time to experiment with upgrading my Dell Latitude D820 part 1

  As part of my preparation for delivering the TechDays08 demos, I need to configure my laptop with 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.  I would like to configure my laptop as dual boot with Windows Server 2008 but I don't have a lot of free space Read More... Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 1:13 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• 401 HTTP return code in Web Application monitor test even if you can get the page successfully

  While configuring monitoring of a web site for a customer, I was perplexed by a 401 (unauthorized) HTTP return code.  This error was present even when I attempted to configure the monitor using a browser recording session.  Within the session Read More... Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 7:25 AM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• CPE Extensions presentation made the MyITForum newsletter

  Wow, I gave a presentation last week on System Center Operations Manager Cross Platform Extensions and it was well received so I posted my slides. I have been communicating with the folks at MyItForum about replicating blog content and I was happy to Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:57 AM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Self-Study Group Review session for the 70-643 exam

  Last night we completed the review session for the 70-643 self-study group.  I have included a link to my original post in the 70-643 forum at the http://owsug.ca web site. Good luck on the exam! http://owsug.ca/forums/thread/1419.aspx Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:38 AM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• OpsMgr Cross platform extensions presentation

  I gave a presentation to the Ottawa Windows Server User Group on Thursday, September 18 last week.  The presentation was very well received and I was asked to post my slides.  Here they are: Read More... Posted Monday, September 22, 2008 8:47 AM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments Attachment(s): CPE V3(Brad_OWSUG).pptx

• Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Discovery never ends

  A colleague and I were troubleshooting an issue on a customer site where the discovery of available Windows Computers to have an agent deployed to them would never end.  While we got around the issue by installing the agents manually on the servers Read More... Posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 4:21 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• TechDays08 are here!

  As part of being open and transparent – and wanting to have some fun, the Microsoft Canada Audience team thought it would make sense to give you access to all of our information about TechDays Canada 2008 so you can use it as a reference. We don’t Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:00 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Confirmed Presenter for TechDays08!

  The deal is sealed.  I am a presenter for TechDays08! I will be presenting: Toronto (October 29-30) Building High Availability Infrastructures With Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering - Infrastructure Track Virtualization Chalk Talk - Virtualization Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2008 11:54 AM by Brad Bird | 1 Comments

• Mail merge automation fails in MS Word when linked with a data source

  I stumbled on a strange issue yesterday while working at a customer site. The automated mail merge was failing in Word 2003 when called from my script. After performing some research, the reason for the failure was an interactive prompt waiting for a Read More... Posted Thursday, September 04, 2008 12:44 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Event Tracing for Windows or ETW logging for OpsMgr

  In some instances, we require as much detail in logging as humanly possible to help troubleshoot an issue.  To this end, we utilize debug level logging. In Operations Manager SP1, this feature is installed by default.  It is situated in the Read More... Posted Wednesday, September 03, 2008 9:30 AM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Virtual PC Console seems to have disappeared and will not display

  This issue has plagued me for several months so I finally decided to do something about it. Virtual PC 2007 used to work fine when the console was opened, all was well.  Suddenly and without warning, I would launch Virtual PC and the Console would Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 02, 2008 3:47 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments

• Interesting facts about the new Intel and AMD CPUs

  I was reading some documentation in the latest PC Gamer Summer 2008 issue today.  Both new CPUs offer blinding speeds. The new Intel Quad-Core CPU is actually 2 Dual-Core CPUs which talk together in a single chip.  Whereas the AMD Phenom (pronounced Read More... Posted Monday, September 01, 2008 7:26 PM by Brad Bird | 0 Comments