Well, I got a reply from the DiskWarrior folks I mentioned on Saturday and it turns out you must run it while logged in as an administrative user, simply elevating privileges at the usual prompt is not enough (a useful warning or something more descriptive would seem more in line for, you know, a Mac […]

Last night, Friday evening at about four thirty to be precise, I get the call that a user has attempted to restart the Mac “server” (running OS X 10.4 but attached to an external RAID5 array and used as a file server) by doing a hard power cycle of the external SCSI RAID array. While […]

I really like gadgets, electronic toys, and technology. Sorry, I mean, um, tools. Yeah, tools. Anyway — what a shock, right? Coming from a Church IT guy? Well, I see plenty of cool stuff, I have some of it, and I look forward to an occasional new toy when I can afford it. But I […]

We use proximity (“prox”) card readers with our Parent Pager Plus system to assign pagers (and optionally assign a prox card to each family) for sign in and emergency contact purposes. When we added a check-in station several months ago, we purchased a used prox card reader but received no power plug for it. So […]

I’ve been assigned a new office, in our new building.  I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that before, I may have.  But it was official just over a week ago…although I haven’t had time to move.  Until today!  My mom and dad joined my wife and son (although he mainly just enjoyed the stroller rides […]

Is anyone else using 802.1x for wired authentication? I’ve got it working for wireless networking, which is pretty cool. But what about wired ports? I don’t necessarily want to go to the trouble of locking down every port on campus with 802.1x. Or do I? But public ports are what worry me. For now, the […]

Our server room’s battery backup consists of a couple of off-the-shelf APC battery backup units, running an ever-expanding collection of servers (about six, depending on what you term a “server”).  Not the optimal solution, but a cost-effective one that was good enough when the server count was lower. It’s been so good, in fact, that […]

Just a quick note that HP ProCuve has some new (since I last checked) web-managed (but still VLAN-capable) switches, the 1700 series. The 1700-8G is a 10/100 8-port switch, and the 1700-24G is a 24-port model of the same, which also has two dual-personality ports (ports 23 and 24 are copper Ethernet ports by default, […]

Tony Dye has an excellent post that is along the lines of my own posts here and here regarding hardware inventory. His wish list seems to communicate even better than my posts what I’d like from the inventory side of things, but I still want a helpdesk to be integrated into the same system. Some […]

I’ve been looking for a good hardware inventory and helpdesk ticket solution. I got two suggestions, OCSInventory and ManageEngine OpManager. I also found a post by Jason Powell about switching to ManageEngine Service Desk Plus. I have a huge amount of respect for Jason and his team, so I’ve tried out the free trial of […]