David Vielmetter

Category: Tricks

  • Four ways to remotely reboot a Windows machine

    As a sysadmin you will eventually have to deal with a system that has become unresponsive at the GUI. Fortunately, there are several ways to reboot a Windows PC from another windows PC or server on the network. Here are four of my favorite methods to do this: 1. The shutdown command. This is a…

  • Create a virtual router to provide Internet access to a virtual LAN

    In this tutorial, I’ll be talking about connecting a virtual LAN network created using VirtualBox to a physical LAN segment with Internet access. The reason for this tutorial is to demonstrate that it is possible to create a virtual environment that closely mimics a production company LAN network in functionality. This includes being able to…

  • Show up-to-date server info on the desktop background of all your servers

    If you’re a sysadmin like me, you’ll have multiple RDP sessions to multiple servers open a the same time on occasion. They tend to look alike if you keep things standardized and this can introduce the risk of human error when it comes to maintenance. If all RDP sessions look the same, it can be…

  • BOX sync agent status shows complete but folder icons show syncing

    Box gave away 50GB of cloud storage space to non-paying members a while back and I figured I could use it to back up my Pictures and Music. Box works like Dropbox in the sense that it syncs everything in one directory on your computers hard drive to the cloud. After installing the sync agent…

  • Password reset delegation not working

    Whenever you’re working in an Active Directory domain you didn’t setup yourself, there’s a good chance someone has made changes that won’t be obvious. Therefore implementing further changes may not always have the expected results even if you’ve tested them thoroughly in a test environment. Active Directory is a complex system with many dependencies and…

  • Migrating your company email to Office365

    Hosted email services are a good deal for small to midsize businesses. There’s no hardware or software to buy, services are guaranteed to be available in the cloud, security is always up-to-date and the latest features are built-in. These days the two biggest competitors in this arena are Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. When Google…

  • Recover data from a damaged drive

    This is my guide for recovering data off of a damaged hard drive. It comes with absolutely no guarantees or warranties, however the procedure has helped me recover data in cases where others believed all data to be completely lost. I’m not going to go into the reasons why hard drives fail, but I’ll cover…

  • Dual monitor configuration reset after reboot

    I’ve been having this problem with my system ever since I added a second monitor. I set up my display settings such that my monitor 2 is my default display and the display is extended to monitor 1 and arrange them how I like them to be. Then I reboot the system at some point…

  • AppAssure 5 does not adhere to the default retention policy

    I’ve had an issue recently where a new installation of Dell AppAssure 5 did not keep the correct number of snapshots based on a chosen retention policy. The issue after working with a awfully slow tech support over the course of three weeks was to update to a specific newer release of Dell AppAssure Version…

  • Salesforce for Outlook on Windows 2008 Server

    Say you’re building a new Terminal Server with Windows 2008 R2 x64 Remote Desktop Services for your mobile sales people to use. Maybe they want to use Outlook 2010 on this Terminal Server and be able to add emails from Outlook to Salesforce. Well they CAN’T! For some stupid reason the Salesforce for Outlook add-in…