VMWare ESX Server Admin Tips (What they don’t teach you in class!)

March 25 2009 by admin in I.T. Knowledgebase, Virtual Computing |Comments Off on VMWare ESX Server Admin Tips (What they don’t teach you in class!)

Unless you happen to be the developer, or involved in the code writing process it is rare that you will learn all the “undocumented features” of any given software.  Such is the case for myself and one of the techs I manage involving VMWare’s ESX server product.  The company we work for went completely virtual last year, and we were left with the headache of managing the new non-physical server farm and all it’s various issues.  We both attended an instructor led VMware ESX admin class at Global Knowledge (given by VMWare) and have now worked with the product for a little over a year, yet we constantly find new ways to do routine maintenance tasks, and solutions to problems that are not covered in any class.  In many cases we have discovered solutions that even Tech Support at VMware didn’t know about, or at the very least the lower level techs didn’t know about.  Below are some TIPS we have discovered that we learned outside the classroom environment.  Hopefully any of you reading these can be saved the time and effort we went through to find them.

Tip 1: Transfer files from server to your local machine.
You can use the SFTP protocol to connect to the ESX datastore. WinSCP was the 1st SFTP client I used to connect to our datastore, but later an awesome VMware tech (rare) told me about FastSCP. An SFTP client which was specifically designed to work with ESX server, and increases the transfer speed 10 fold. Think of BitTorrent for ESX Server. You can use this to transfer files between servers and your local machine for what ever reason. Continue reading »

Becoming a GACP (Google AdWords Certified Professional) Seminars for Success

March 23 2009 by admin in Training/Certifications |Comments Off on Becoming a GACP (Google AdWords Certified Professional) Seminars for Success

I’m breaking up my “Becoming a GACP….” post to write about my experience attending the Seminars for Success – Google Web Optimizer one day course.  I really wanted to attend the two day Google Analytics seminars, but I had a personal commitment on the second day, so I decided to sit those out.

The seminar was very informative and well worth the $250 bucks I paid for it.  It gave a great deal of information on using Google’s Web Optimizer for landing page testing, as well as showing you how to go about inserting the code into your website, and teaching you how to inertput the results of the test, and make the changes you need to increase conversion rates.  The seminar also covered a great deal about best practices for setting up landing pages, the psycology of selling on the net, and ways to tweek your landing pages for optimal click through.

These are the notes I took, but I was only able to keep up until they hit the coding section.  Once they hit the coding section, they pretty much followed exactly what they gave us in slides, so I have omitted that section.  The rest of my notes are below. Continue reading »

Becoming a GACP (Google AdWords Certified Professional) Part 1

March 17 2009 by admin in Training/Certifications, Tutorials |Comments Off on Becoming a GACP (Google AdWords Certified Professional) Part 1

I have discussed becoming a GACP (Google AdWords Certified Professional) in a previous post, so feel free to check it out.  I have decided that I am committed to adding this certification to my resume and have started watching the videos in the Google Learning Center.

I have finished the first section and for the most part it was pretty strait forward… until it got to the section on calculating the actual amount you have to pay per click based on your minumum and maximum bids per keyword.  I had to watch that one video section at least 5 times to fully get a grasp on the pay model.  All formulas and math asside, the bottom line is that the amount you “actually” have to pay is largely determined by a “Quality Score” variable that google assigns you that A. you have no control over, and B. is never actually shown to you.

So bottom line is that Google does what it wants, and you really have no control of how the system assigns you a price per key word.  The only thing that saves you is that you can set a budget so you don’t have to pay more than you can afford.  Obviously, if the advertising works, then your gonna pay what ever the price is, so long as you can still turn a profit, but that’s what happens when one player has control over 80% of the market.

Anyway, below are my notes on the “Introduction To Adwords” with the most difficult of the video lessons at the very bottom. Continue reading »

Cleaning up your Exchange Mail Store!

March 16 2009 by admin in Exchange and Mail, I.T. Knowledgebase |Comments Off on Cleaning up your Exchange Mail Store!

I was recently tasked with cleaning up an exchange mail store that was nearing the 75 GB limit for the Exchange 2003 server it was being used on.  (In actually, the mail store was 45GB and the public folder store was 26GB putting the total for the store near 71GB.)  The event log indicated that Exchange 03 didn’t like the fact that the mail store was reaching it’s limit and was complaining via a periodic mounting and dismounting of the mail store.

After quick review of the companies employee rouster, it occured to me that over half the employees with mailboxes were no longer with the company, and no longer recieving mail. OK, so what needed to be done was to backup (remove) the mailboxes not in use, and then defragment the mailstore to clean up all the “white space” in the database.  (Note: just deleting the mailboxes will not create more space in the exchange mail store database due to the way “single instance storage” works in exchange, so you have to perform a defragment manually.)

Here’s how it went down: Continue reading »

How to change the default location for the “My Documents” folder.

March 16 2009 by admin in Tutorials |Comments Off on How to change the default location for the “My Documents” folder.

To change the default location of the My Documents folder, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then point to My Documents.
2. Right-click My Documents, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Target tab.
4. In the Target box, do one of the following:
* Type the path to the folder location that you want, and then click OK. For example, D:\My Stuff.

If the folder does not exist, the Create Message dialog box is displayed. Click Yes to create the folder, and then click OK.

-or-
* Click Move, click the folder in which to store your documents, and then click OK twice.

If you need to create a new folder, click Make New Folder. Type a name for the folder, and then click OK twice. Continue reading »

Forcing a Time Sync to your Domain Controllers.

March 16 2009 by admin in Active Directory, I.T. Knowledgebase |Comments Off on Forcing a Time Sync to your Domain Controllers.

Last week immediately following the time shift for “daylight savings” we noticed our Primary Domain Controler (PDC) and our Backup Domain Controler (BDC) had a time difference of greater than 30 mins.  This was not caused by the time shift, but something we discovered while checking to see if our infrastructure had updated the time properly.

Below is a method to resync them.

Check the system date and time on every DC to find the wrong one. Use net time to synchronize time between DCsb then run gpupdate and everything will be alright.

Open a command prompt window and type in:

net time /setsntp:us.pool.ntp.org

You can replace us.pool.ntp.org with what ever NTP server you wish to use.

0.pool.ntp.org
1.pool.ntp.org

are just a couple other examples.

Once finnished, type gpupdate and you should be good to go.

DO NOT FORGET: Check your bios time/date/timezone. It may be affecting it.

How to convert your Domain Profile to a Local Profile.

March 14 2009 by admin in Tutorials |Comments Off on How to convert your Domain Profile to a Local Profile.

This is useful when you have been doing consultant work on your own laptop, while joined to a clients domain, and you wish to leave said company while still retaining all the work and setting you had while joined to their domain.

I’ve found doing a manual transfer to be more reliable then using the inbuilt profile copy (the one where you go into profiles and right click copy) and personally i haven found USMT (user state migration tool) to miss stuff or just totally screw up the new profile.

To manually copy the profile over here are the steps. Continue reading »

Make Money! Become a Google Adwords Certified Professional! (GACP)

March 11 2009 by admin in Training/Certifications |Comments Off on Make Money! Become a Google Adwords Certified Professional! (GACP)

I was surfing the web looking for some info about Google’s Ad-Words program when I came upon a company charging $250 dollars an hour for someone with a GACP certification to set up my advertising campaign. So I said to myself, “what the heck is a GACP?” Turns out GACP or Google Adwords Certified Professional is an exam that Google offers to anyone with an adwords account. Google provides all the training material in both video and text format and the test is taken online for a cost of $50 bucks.

Here is the link to the Google Learning Center.

Here is the link to the Google Advertising Professional Program.

You can become certified as a company or as an individual.

Why Should I Get Certified you ask?

On completion of the exam will be awarded the Qualified Google Advertising Professional Logo, something that looks very good if you are personally involved in a business that uses Adwords. Add it to your resume as a proof or your qualifications, or just take it for yourself. AND did I mention that you can make some serious money with it? Continue reading »

Places for Information Technology Professionals to moonlight!

March 11 2009 by admin in Awesome Websites |Comments Off on Places for Information Technology Professionals to moonlight!

Looking to pick up some supplemental income?  Then here are a few places you should try out.

ONFORCE, is one site I have used extensively. You sign up and submit your skill set and location. They will send you text messages when jobs are available in your area. You can bid on the jobs, and accept the ones you want. After you finish the work, you fill out a job log and then Onforce forwards your money (minus a 10% finders fee) to your checking or savings account. Most of the jobs are Information Technology Infrastructure related, although there are some point-of-sale, TV, and enterprise class printer jobs as well. They have a relationship with Dell and HP to assist workers with certifications (I have a separate post about that in the Training and Certifications section). They use a 6 point rating system to weed out the bad techs, as well as the bad work providers. You can even get a background check put in your profile for a nominal fee.

I’ve had a very positive experience with Onforce! Check out my profile here and here!

ODESK is practically a clone of  ONFORCE.  I have not used this site, but it came recommended to me from a reliable source, so I’ll include it in this post.

Finally there’s ELANCE.  Elance is geared primarily for coders, and web development people.  Again, I haven’t used this site but it come highly recommend.  If coding is your thing be sure to check it out!


“Windows can not find SYSOCMGR.exe” error message when connecting to network fax with Vista client.

March 10 2009 by admin in I.T. Knowledgebase, Vista and Windows 7 |Comments Off on “Windows can not find SYSOCMGR.exe” error message when connecting to network fax with Vista client.

When you try to connect to a remote fax printer on a computer that is running Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Enterprise, the fax installation fails, and you get “Windows can not find SYSOCMGR.exe” error message!

This issue occurs because fax installation tries to install the fax feature by using the Windows Components Wizard (Sysocmgr.exe). By default, this fax feature is not installed in Windows Vista Business or in Windows Vista Enterprise.

There is currently no hot fix but you can do a workaround in the following manner:

To work around this issue, install the fax feature by using Programs and Features in Control Panel. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Click Start, type programs and features in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
  2. Click Turn Windows features on or off, click to select the Windows Fax and Scan check box, and then click OK.

Stupid Vista!

« Previous Page — Next Page »