Blog entries from Tom Finnis

How to remove old NICs after virtualization

Tom Finnis — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:37:35 +0100

After performing a physical to virtual conversion one of the tasks you have to do is to set the IP address of the new virtual NIC. When you do this you then get a warning message saying the IP is already assigned to the physical NIC, Windows 2008 is better than 2003 as it at leasts removes it from the old NIC for you.

All the same this seems a bit illogical, that physical NIC is no longer connected to the server so why should it keep the details? Also it can cause confusion for somRead More...

Unable to activate Windows after virtualization

Tom Finnis — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:39:37 +0100

I've been migrating a client to vSphere 4 this weekend and have encountered this problem with all their servers, and its not the first time either so I thought I should share the solution.

This is most common with Dell servers and their so called "OEM" licensing, and its another one of their sly cost-saving measures that you dont notice until they really cause you a hassle. To elaborate a bit more, you may or may not be aware that OEM stands for Original Equipment ManufactureRead More...

How to access the local console on ESXi 4.0

Tom Finnis — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0100

We've just acquired a pair of HP DL380 G6s for our vSphere 4 test lab, they have the new Intel Nehalem Xeon CPUs and chipset with all the latest virtualisation features. Plenty more to come on all that but first of all here's something you won't find in the documentation. Having just installed the ESXi 4.0 hypervisor on the servers the classic question came up from one of the junior technicians - "what's the difference between ESX and ESXi?". Someone else then answered that ESXi doesn't have Read More...

IE7 and IE8 - self signed SSL certificate not trusted?

Tom Finnis — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0100

Although proper SSL certificates from providers such as Digicert and Verisign have become much cheaper nowadays there are still many occasions when you might prefer to just use a self signed certificate. One of the most common occurences of this is with SBS server, to provide SSL secured web services such as OWA and RPC over HTTP. However the certificate warning you get everytime you open the web site is annoying and maybe confusing for less experienced users. In older versions of IE you coulRead More...

Checking Internet Bandwidth Usage on a Cisco PIX or Router

Tom Finnis — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100

One complaint our helpdesk hears quite often from clients is that "our Internet access seems really slow today", which is a particularly vague and subjective problem. Once the technician has established that this condition is affecting all users and isnt just a temporary period of high demand what can he do to establish the cause of the problem?

Usually the lack of Internet bandwidth becomes apparent when the technician opens a remote session on theRead More...

SCO Unix on VMware ESX - virtualisation solves a client's problem

Tom Finnis — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100

A few months ago we took over the IT support for an insurance firm in the City, but with the contract we inherited a problem the previous IT company couldn't resolve. Part of the firm's business still ran on a ten year SCO Unix server which was barely clinging to life and hadn't been backed up for three years. They still had a support contract with the original suppliers of the SCO system but they had quoted over £10k to migrate their data to the current platform. The system was runningRead More...

Authenticated and anonymous SMTP relays in Exchange 2007

Tom Finnis — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0100

Petri have just published my latest guide which shows you how to setup authenticated and anonymous SMTP relay services on an Exchange 2007 server.

You can view the article here

Public Folders on Windows Mobile & Blackberry

Tom Finnis — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

This is a subject I haven't looked at for some time, maybe surprisingly its something we don't get asked about all that often. A typical scenario might be where a company has an Exchange Calendar Public Folder containing details of company events, important dates and so on. They want their mobile users to be able to view this calendar on their Blackberrys or Windows Mobile phones so how do they go about it?

The short answer I discovered at the time was that they can't Read More...

Setting up a LAN Extension Service (LES) WAN connection

Tom Finnis — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

LES circuits have become increasingly common in recent years for providing high speed WAN links between two sites, usually either between two company offices or between a client site and an ISP PoP (Point of Presence), where it is used to provide Internet connectivity. The limiting factor is usually distance to the nearest PoP as the LES circuit cannot cover more than about 15km so they tend to be limited to city environments. It is based on fibre optic technology but the end connections are Read More...

Exchange 2007 catchall email mailboxes

Tom Finnis — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I'm not a fan of catchall mailboxes, they are a legacy of POP mail systems and getting Exchange to do it has always been a bodge. However the need arose recently with a client we migrated to SBS2008 so I decided to see what the options are for doing it in Exchange 2007.

A quick web search will probably turn up several sites explaining how to use transport rules to achieve a catchall mailbox, and they do make it very easy. Unfortunately there is one major drawback, the required transportRead More...

Windows 7 Beta on ESX - no NIC driver?

Tom Finnis — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I finally felt I had time to get round to installing the Windows 7 Beta and see what all the fuss was about for myself. Now I could setup my shiney new Samsung NC10 to dual boot it but I thought it would be best to play it safe and start off with a virtual machine. Apart from the helpful snapshot function in ESX it would also be more team friendly as the rest of the technicians could access it. So I created a new VM on one of our ESX dev servers, assigned it a 12GB virtual disk and attached tRead More...

Using ESX for a workshop/training environment

Tom Finnis — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I've been helping one of the nice people upstairs prepare for some lectures he is going to present for his local community. Its an IT education class but concentrating particularly on domestic users and the dangers of the Internet - malware, phishing and the rest. Now his local council helpfully have a large IT facility with about 50 PCs in it which would be ideal for training except of course they have gone to an awful lot of effort to prevent anyone installing any sort of malware. ThisRead More...

Why you need a UPS and surge protection

Tom Finnis — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We'd recently taken over the IT support for a small 10 user network in the Aldgate area and just completed our network healthcheck report. Amongst the recommendations was to review the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) setup. Of course, in line with somebody's law, they had a major power outage before all our recommendations were implemented....

Apparently a transformer at the local electricity substation blew in a spectacular way, causing a major power surge before the protectiRead More...

Linux Disaster Recovery & Bare Metal Restore

Tom Finnis — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We recently had an enquiry from a client who has around 150 Linux servers in about 20 data centres scattered around the UK. They have a perfectly effective backup solution but were interested in improving their Disaster Recovery, in particular how to speed up recovery of a server in the event of hardware failure. In particular they wanted a solution that would allow them to take complete system images that when required could be quickly restored to a replacement server. Not only that butRead More...