November 25th, 2009 by mrburch

I picked up a Dell Latitude 2100 netbook about a month ago. I was ready for an updated laptop and the 2100 seemed too good to be true. I picked it up from the Dell outlet, a deal that can’t be beat. The 2100 is targeted at students/schools but the semi-rugged design and size makes it perfect for mounting in a vehicle. I have mine mounted on a Ram Mount laptop mount in my Ford Explorer. The 2100’s specs match most standard netbooks. Added features are the optional touch-screen and the standard rubberized, protective finish on the top and bottom. I have been thoroughly impressed with its performance.

June 5th, 2009 by mrburch

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Ever spent LOTS of time trying to find out where all of your precious hard disk space is going? Showman from David Taylor is a neat pie chart driven application that will help. There is no installation, just run it and tell it where to search; entire disk or drilled down to a folder. You’ll quickly find where the cause of those low disk space alerts is at, for instance a developers temp directory on a terminal server…

March 19th, 2009 by mrburch

So another lesson learned. I originally created this blog using Dreamhost’s One Click Install in Easy mode. I wanted to edit layout of the theme but couldn’t figure out how. The great support staff at Dreamhost reminded me of the blatantly obvious text at installation that said something to the affect of “You can’t edit or upload themes if you install in Easy mode.” So uninstall\reinstall in Advanced mode\restore and here we are again. Apparently I was supposed to read the instructions.

March 19th, 2009 by mrburch

Several months ago I was working on a WSUS server for TeleVox. After configuring group policy I found that only about half of the machines were discovered. Even after several days/weeks there were still 30 or so machines undiscovered. I had used the auto detect tools from MS to no avail. Finally today I found the following commands:

net stop wuauserv
REG DELETE “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate” /v AccountDomainSid /f
REG DELETE “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate” /v PingID /f
REG DELETE “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate” /v SusClientId /f
net start wuauserv
wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow

I rolled them up into a batch file and ran it on one of the missing servers. The first two registry keys weren’t found, but the last one was present and deleted. I checked WSUS and sure enough my server was now there. After a little more research it looks like the WSUS Client Id’s on these machines were the same. I didn’t build out these boxes but I think they were probably imaged/cloned. Deleting the Client ID and reissuing allowed them to show up again. From this point there are several options for deployment, but I think I will just manually run on each. Cross that off the to-do list!

March 19th, 2009 by mrburch

I finally decided to open a blog on here. Hopefully this will be a way to share various thoughts and ideas, probably more for my benefit than anyone else’s. We’ll see what happens. The title of this blog “Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid” is borrowed from the title of a Collective Soul music album, a great album and a great title.