The ramblings of a computer geek
Notepad++ can be quite a handy tool to use, I often use it when building up bulk CLI commands to enter into switches or firewalls. Say you had a list of hosts and wanted to add some text to the beginning, that’s fairly easy, you just click, hold ALT and then select all the lines, … Read more
IMPORTANT! The below scripts are not supported by Dell nor is there use on a Dell ECS node, you therefore utilise these steps at your own risk. We have these scripts running on Dell ECS nodes in production to collect hardware information and report it back periodically and no issues have been identified yet. The … Read more
I’ve used Clonezilla a few times in the past, its a quick and convenient way to replace a hard disk (e.g. upgrading from a spinning rust disk to an SSD) in your machine without needing to rebuild the OS from scratch. But Clonezilla can also be used to clone the disk to an image, as … Read more
A quick and effective way to get additional desktop space is to use a USB Graphics Adapter, in my case I used the Star Tech USB32VGAPRO. It supports a good range of resolutions but in my case I wanted to use 1680×1050 which is the same as my in-built graphics resolution outputs at. However when … Read more
We recently deployed some hardware Kemp ECS Connection Managers (which are designed to front the Dell ECS storage platform), however we were a bit dismayed to see there was no way to monitor the hardware status via GUI, SNMP or the Rest API. We had this issue raised after we had a PSU failure occur … Read more
Sometimes its easy to get wrapped up in the more complicated things and forget about the basics. Something as simple as power to your equipment being fully resilient can be forgotten but if it fails you can find yourself dealing with an outage that you don’t really want to have had to deal with. Balancing … Read more
There are a number of ways to protect your WordPress site, one of the best quick wins is to ensure that your Admin page cannot be accessed by any IP address on the Internet. If you have a static IP address (or a number of static IP addresses), then the below will allow you to … Read more
Using Data Centre/Center Expert and adding an APC ATS switch, even though the configuration was correct, FTP was enabled and the relevant settings set for SNMP for the relevant IP addresses the following error is observed in the Data Centre Expert “Device status may be inaccurate due to attempt to transfer DDF failed”. After much … Read more
I recently purchased a 2 Bay Synology 720+ NAS, however at the time of purchase I only had enough money to buy one drive and then wanted to add the second one at a later date. I also wanted to ensure that these were installed with a Mirror for 1 drive fault tolerance. The answer … Read more
I recently bought the Tado Smart Thermostats for my house to attach to my radiators. You’ll be familiar with such things as Hive and Nest which are Smart Thermostats, essentially these just make your Heating Thermostat you’ll typically have in your hall or landing into your home Internet enabled, so you can control it from … Read more