Welcome back to ‘Adventures in Home Networking’ – Part 2. Recently, due to changes in our household, we were forced to consider making some physical changes to the way the house was set up. A decision was reached to move my home office into one of the bedrooms, so that […]
Infrastructure
114 posts
Recently, I’ve had no end of hassles activating valid copies of Windows – be it Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. At first, I thought it was perhaps the result of a “usual” cause – network connectivity, blocked ports or so on. To begin – a recap. I installed […]
Today was a big day if you happen to enjoy Release Candidate builds from Microsoft. Not only did we see the RC release of both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 (and Hyper-V Server), but it also coincided with the release of RC editions of the Visual Studio 11 developer […]
Recently I bought a brand new Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, as I’ve wanted (for a while) to redo my approach to storage capacity and – more specifically – add some fault tolerance (by way of redundant disks). I did some research and looked in to a number of NAS […]
When we moved into our new residence last year, we were not quite prepared for the long, painful learning process which was coming our way. This was the first time we had lived in a property featuring a back-to-base alarm system; and therefore the first time to experience pain with […]
Overshadowed, possibly, by the release of the new iPad? Not in the world of databases. Yesterday Microsoft officially released SQL Server 2012 “release to manufacturing” (RTM) which means we’re officially out of pre-release editions! Previously codenamed ‘Denali’, the new version brings to the table some serious changes, some of which […]
Recently Microsoft released a ‘Consumer Preview’ of their upcoming Windows 8 operating system. Today I downloaded a copy of the release and installed it into a virtual machine. What follows are screenshots of the installation process, and some notes about the OS once it has finished installation. Installation The setup […]
Introduction From time to time, it is natural for us to deploy BizTalk solutions with Assembly dependencies. Usually this is because we have created helper classes (for mapping, or querying) or perhaps it reuses some common logic shared between application suites. Whatever the reason, it can be very handy to […]
It’s been a tough week for me from a hardware and infrastructure perspective. Late Thursday night, I lost one of the two desktop machines I own which still functioned. It had been on its way out for a while in theory, since somehow the CPU fan docking clamps were broken […]
Recently, I decided that I need to begin a new learning exercise. This time around, I’ve chosen Apache Hadoop, partly because of the weird name, and partly because of how it is defined. To add clarity, here’s the official definition from the Apache site: What Is Apache Hadoop? The Apache […]
Part 1 Setting up TFS Azure Part 2 Configuring Visual Studio to use TFS Azure Part 3 Registering Team Build controllers for TFS Azure Part 4 Builds in the Cloud Introduction Continuing from Part 2, now that we have the essentials set up, we’ll take a look at how to […]
Introduction It is important to understand what a network load balanced cluster is and what it does. The cluster is made up of member hosts, and each host is bound to a public IP address (or addresses) which resolve to the cluster itself. Each host in the cluster must have […]
Recently I conducted a mini-audit of some of our less used servers and virtual machines, mainly hunting for some candidates to participate in load testing (hosts for Test Agents). Upon one server I was *amazed* to find a virtual server which had been running for 1,862 days! We’re talking over […]
Not too long ago I wrote an article about Team Foundation Server licensing. Now that it is 2011, and after some recent access requests for TFS, I’ve decided it is time for an update. Does TFS cover SQL Server Licensing? One instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition or […]
We love it when a good patch comes around – so here is a cumulative patch for the .NET Framework 4.0. There is a fairly long and extensive list of changes included in the GDR, here is a list of fixes and new features which have been added (from the […]