The ramblings of a computer geek
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
I had a bit of a read about that issue you were talking about with the fire suppression system causing system outages for Channel 4 recently (article). The reports all used seem to use the phrase “sucked the air out of the room”, this would imply a vacuum, which it wouldn’t have been. So in … Read more
The Synology NAS range can be used to run the Plex Media Server. However the Plex service needs to be configured with permissions to read your media files. In my example I have a Shared Folder on the NAS called “tv”, and I want Plex to be able to read, index and play these files. … Read more
A single-mode or multi-mode duplex fibre optic patch cable a simple enough item, commonly you’ll find these with an LC connector on the end. What are the types? The default type is typically a UPC (Ultra Physical Contact) type connector, if you were to ask a supplier for a fibre patch cable this is normally … Read more
OpenManage Enterprise version 3.4 allows automatic discovery of servers that have iDRAC firmware version 4.00.00.00 or later. The appliance can be configured to allow these servers to automatically locate the console by querying the DNS and initiate their discovery. The instructions (and this) give the use of the TUI or manual creation for Dell Openmanage … Read more
If you need to copy files from one storage location to another Robocopy is a great tool, but like every great tool it comes with loads of options. In this scenario I was needing to copy a directory structure (and all the files) from one location to another but preserving all the permissions, ownership and … Read more