Windows Intune for Windows 8
I found the secret sauce to make the Fall 2012 release of Intune work with Windows 8.
Happy now I can manage the new machines with Intune.
2013
Fifteen years ago I would spend six weeks writing the incorrect year on every cheque I wrote.
In 2013 I’ll be lucky to write a cheque during the year.
Browsers
I’ve been a long time user and supporter of Firefox – through all of the pains and memory hogging years. Before that I swore by Netscape Navigator.
I dabbled for a short time with Rockmelt – good idea – but didn’t seem to have the execution and updates.
I’m now back to trying Chrome. It’s improved a lot.
For fairness – Internet Explorer 10 is actually pretty impressive too. The ONE THING that I miss is a plugin that does adblock. There is a paid option for IE9 – but nothing for IE10.
Testing blogging from Office 2013
Word 2013 allows direct publishing to a blog – this is my first test to see if it’s a replacement for the venerable Windows Live Writer.
ZoomIt
I just got reminded of this very cool demo tool.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx
ZoomIt is free – and lets you zoom into an area of the screen to highlight a piece of functionality or an area of interest. Great for demos.
Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012
Just loving Windows Server 2012 and the updated version of Hyper-V – it’s fast and furious on modern hardware.
The updated Linux support is great too – multiple v-procs – and great aware drivers for SUSE Linux.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
There’s a lot to be said about ease of use – especially when it comes to extensive customisation.
I’ve spent the weekend installing and building the “back office” for Grania’s business using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 – and it’s been pleasantly rewarding. No code, no SQL, no UI hacking – and I’ve got a really solid, supportable CRM for her Music Together business fully working.
The best part is that the customisation is fully portable – and can be moved up to Dynamics CRM Online. That’s powerful.
The startup goes live
I’m the silent half of Grania’s business. The business process, policy and web monkey. I talk about marketing, lead generation, moving people through the funnel – she gets to teach pre-schoolers Music Together® classes.
The best part of all – telling friends that the business had gone live – and watching the Apache logs to see when people hit the site. It was a real warm and fuzzy moment to see .. one.. two.. three.. then more hits to the site. Early days; and friends aren’t customers – but one step has been taken.
Heat kills hard drives
It was hot this weekend – over 35°C (92°F) outside – and the home servers were suffering somewhat.
Western Washington is pretty friendly for servers – it’s usually cool – but we do get occasional spikes.
Normally I’ll add an extra fan to the rack – but this time I was away for the weekend. The firewall/IDS server hard drive collapsed and died. The alert monitors sent a final notification that the internal temperature reached 120°C. The final straw was a power outage for over an hour that triggered the UPS and graceful shutdown. On power restoration everything came back as expected – but the firewall sat with an unbootable file system.
It only took twenty minutes to replace the hardware – and it running happily at 42°C right now.
Postfix, IPv6 and non-delivery
Interesting issue this week with Postfix and IPv6. The webserver was resolving MX records as usual for delivery of blog notification – and also looking up AAAA records for delivery via SMTP over IPv6. Without a functioning route from home to the far end these were obviously failing and not retrying with the (routable) IPv4.
The fix was to force Postfix to only use IPv4 – there’s a great readme on this.
/etc/postfix/main.cf: # You must stop/start Postfix after changing this parameter. inet_protocols = ipv4 (DEFAULT: enable IPv4 only)
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