Ahh! One of my servers had a bad stick of RAM and caused all sorts of problems with VMWare ESX Server. At first, I thought ESX was too sensitive but later realized the stick was just super bad. Meanwhile, my evaluation version expired and so I decided to use VMware Server 1.0 (free) on top of SuSE 10.2 (also free). …

Thanks to my favorite site on the planet, I discovered a new service called whos.among.us which provides a really cool AJAX based web stats app. The setup is very simple -- it only requires you to embed a picture on your website to begin tracking visitors. There's no setup or registration required. My favorite part is …

I borrowed part of the title of this post from Wired's Wiki How-to but I thought their list was kinda crappy so I decided to make my own. I created the list below based off of what I've been told by my friend Trevor, an out-of-office ninja.

Trevor is always calling me from the beach or the lobby of a hotel (breaking …

I really wish I had more experience with DTS and SSIS (Replication, Clustering, Hardcore HA too), especially since I've been a DBA for 8 years. I bought the Wrox book "Professional SQL Server 2000 DTS" years ago hoping that one day I'd be making 50-step DTS packages but I never had the need. Today, I finished …

This is driving me absolutely crazy. For the 80th time, I'm required to create a user and give it the sysadmin role. I *have* to do this because the software is business critical (Blackberry Enterprise Server, Interwoven DMS) and installs will fail without it. With some software, I can temporarily grant access the take …

For those of you living in the Bay Area, SuperHappyDevHouse is going on today. I'll likely make a late arrival after I pick up my broken server in San Jose.

WTF is SHDH, you ask? "DevHouse is not a marketing event. It's a non-exclusive event intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have …

Recently, I contemplated getting a Vespa again but decided, instead, to stick with my pretty but slow bicycle. My commute is about 2 miles but using San Francisco's public transportation, generally takes 26 minutes from door to door. Too long! I can get there on my bike in 16 minutes but I have to drive in traffic, …

While my firm explores using WebDAV and SharePoint 2007 for exchanging large amounts of files, we're temporarily using FTP dropboxes to fill the void. Last Monday, I setup 11 new accounts and it took a total of one hour to complete the same 15 step process (give or take) for each account. By the time I was finished, I …

If you've ever dealt with NTFS permissions in VBScript, you will no doubt appreciate just how easy PowerShell now makes it to manage access control lists. Basic examples in PowerShell books and around the 'net look something like this:

$directory = "Test" $acl = Get-Acl $directory $accessrule = New-Object …

This code has been in my drafts box for 2 years. I figured I'd just go ahead and publish it, though I'm unsure of the context now.

 1$dom = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain]::GetCurrentDomain()
 2$root = $dom.GetDirectoryEntry()
 3$search = [System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher]$root
 4 …