Heavy Soil

Redirected folders are a blessing, when they work smoothly and result in thousands of otherwise-unprotected folders being stored on a safe server, backed up and available if a PC fails. They can also be an infuriating mess when they go wrong. I recently tested a new redirected folders setup using a GPO and fresh fileserver.…

I have recently built a server, simply to use as a large (100 TB) iSCSI host. A low-end but still a Xeon 6-core CPU, 8 GB RAM, and a caching RAID controller driving two arrarys, a couple of boot SSDs in RAID-1 and a RAID-6 data array across 16 SATA disks. This is a decent…

I have recently done a lot of P2V and V2V work, and have found many things that need tweaks – this one wasn’t well covered by anything I found by Googling, so I thought I’d better document it.

We have a pretty standard OpenVPN setup for some of our users. One of them just got a new phone, and although the trasfer brought over his Google Authenticator app and the code still shows, it no longer works with OpenVPN. This article explains how to resolve this.

This information is mostly available elsewhere, but I have done some Exchange upgrades and migrations recently and found it useful to pull it all together into a single page for reference.

Differencing disks do have their uses, as I see it a more permanent snapshot of just the disk. Recently I needed to merge it back into a normal virtual disk. It took a bit of digging, as deleting the differencing disk is not as simple as you might imagine.

I’ve recently needed to reorganise a very large (>3.5 TB), very complex (millions of folders, tens of millions of files) NTFS filesystem which had been allowed to evolve slowly over the years into a great big mess. Share permissions were a little too liberal, so users of varying technical competence had run riot – applying…