May, 2011

We want to hear what you want us to write about!

Hey you... Yes i AM talking to you. What do you want to see Karl right about? Are you having Windows issues? Do you want a walk through or a tutorial? Well than speak up! Drop us a note in the comments below or shoot an email to karl at AskTheAdmin dot com! Don't be shy,

How to silence a raid alarm…

If one of your Raid 5 disks fails or one or more drives from your Raid 10 array you will hear beeping. There are two ways to disable the beeping and start on your way to recovery. You can either enter your Raid card's bios management console and hitting a key combination like Control + G. You...

Enable remote desktop backgrounds on your servers.

I always need to know if I am working on a real live system or a test environment. The way I tell is by our standard corporate background which tells you what server you are on and what state the server is in among other information. If you RDP into the box and can not see the background there are...

Lock down your servers or workstations just like the NSA!

We read a post over at Lifehacker today pointing us to a wonderful resource on how to harden your systems. Check out this information and the links below to lock down your systems just like America's National Security...

Mac’s can get infected too!

Yes Mac fan boys - it is true! There is a new piece of malware lurking in the depths of the inter-webs. It is called Mac Defender and if you are not careful the application and take over your Mac and attempt to extort money from you. Here are some tips for safe computing on your Mac as well as how...

Learn to use the Windows task manager to your advantage…

I absolutely love the Windows task manager almost as much as I love TOP on 'Nix systems. I use my task manager to monitor network activity of a particular box by clicking on the network tab and seeing throughput. I use the process section to see what is running on my computer (and I can kill...

Open your Windows server’s service MMC with the run menu…

You can open up the services MMC module by hitting the:  Windows Key + R and typing Services.msc followed by the enter key And then you can start, stop and disable services easy as pie!

Continually ping a remote host to see when it comes back up.

Working on servers 100's of miles away from me and sometimes further I do not know when the boxes are back up after a remote reboot. So I drop to the command line and use this command to tell me when the server's NIC is back up:   ping 10.10.10.1 -t   Simply replace the IP address...

Windows 2008 – Role Error with exception code: 0x800B0100

When viewing Server Manager on Windows Server 2008 we are getting a Roles: Error with error details of unexpected error refreshing Server Manager and an exception code: 0x800B0100.The fix is as follows:

1. Download System Update Readiness Tool for Windows Server 2008/Vista –...

Can I upgrade my Power Edge 2950 to quad core Xenon 5400 processors?

I just wanted to save our readers a little bit of grief if they have to deal with the same issue that a friend of mine recently ran into:   My 2950 was working fine with Server 2008 & Hyper-V. Just only had the two dual core CPU's. Ordered two Intel Xeon Quad Core 5400 series...