Sep 29, 2012
Scanning and Printing to Epson Artisan 725 on Fedora 17
It is a wonderful thing to get a new toy to play with, but frustrating when you plug it in and then the trouble begins. It works with most systems but sometimes there is one that just wants to cause a bit of pain. Well that happened recently when I tried to install my Epson Artisan To enjoy scanning over the on Fedora 17. This issue was getting the scanning features to work with GIMP. Previously I was... read more
Sep 25, 2012
How To Set Your VirtualBox 4.2 VM to Automatically Startup
Being system administrators and tweakers we always like to make things automatically take care of themselves, right? Well of course we do and that’s where any auto starts we find are likely to get put in place. A new feature added in VirtualBox 4.2 is autostart, this feature is available in Linux, Solaris and MacOSX hosts only. Let’s say there is a VirtualBox VM you start everytime you... read more
Sep 20, 2012
Windows 2008 R2 Cluster Report with PowerShell
You know how it is, manager love reports and really we geeks like some reports as well. Recently I was tasked to generate a health check report for some of the Windows 2008 R2 Active / Passive clusters using PowerShell. With Windows 2008 R2 cluster Microsoft has provided FailoverClusters modules as well as the deprecated cluster command. There is no per say report to check for a status on clusters. Using... read more
Sep 18, 2012
Speed up Windows 7 and 2008 R2 Network
Slow network is a pain in this high speed Internet and local area networks we have and with Windows 7, Vista and Windows 2008 R2 having a slow network is a big issue. Slow networks can cause issues with accessing shares, accessing and transferring data, DNS name resolutions and of course Internet downloads and uploads. Here are a few items that can be tweaked to aid in reducing some of the slowness with... read more
Sep 16, 2012
How To Set Parental Controls on Windows 7
I often get calls on how to restrict and monitor access of children on the Internet. Let’s face it, the web is a wonderful and dangerous place and we need to keep our children safe. As geeks we are the ones to assist others. With Windows Vista / 7 there are parental controls that we can use to make the systems much safer to use. This post covers how to set up parental controls on a Windows 7 system.... read more
