One of the toughest things new contractors encounter is deciding on an hourly rate. They don’t want to aim too high and miss out on jobs, and they don’t want to go too low and end up worse off than the permanent job they just left. The rate formula My advice is to apply a […]
First let me say that I am not an accountant, nor am I giving anyone advice here to go in a particular direction setting themselves up for contracting. In fact, the best advice I can give you is to speak to your own accountant to discuss how best to set yourself up for contracting. I […]
At some stage during the career of most IT pros the opportunity comes along to spend some time as a contractor. The lure of high rates, fixed hours, frequent new challenges, and the idea of “working for yourself” are what draws most people towards contracting. Each of those carries with it some truths and some […]
Recently I posted about one cause of Outlook Web Access errors that users may experience after their mailbox is migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. Users are presented with a browser error containing the message: Exception type: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.StoragePermanentException Exception message: There was a problem accessing Active Directory. In addition to that common cause I […]
In this article I will demonstrate how to migrate an existing WSUS 3.0 SP1 server from a local SQL Express instance to a remote SQL Server 2005 Database Services instance. Firstly be aware of these limitations when deploying WSUS with a remote SQL Server instance. You cannot use a server configured as a domain controller […]
In this article I will outline how to migrate WSUS 3.0 to a new server using a local SQL Express instance and without downloading all of the updates again. 1. Install WSUS on new server with local express database. 2. During configuration wizard choose "Synchronize from another WSUS server…", enter the name of the existing […]
I get this for the dozen songs I’ve tried so far, and that includes songs I’ve bought from the iTunes Store. Great.
Ed Bott of ZDNet takes a deeper look at reports of iTunes 8 causing crashes on Windows computers. Once again, Apple is using its automatic update process to deliver massive amounts of new software to users, including a device driver that has a long and checkered history of causing the Blue Screen Of Death […]
Here is a tip for Microsoft, if you’re going to pop up and remind me to activate my Windows Server 2008 installation, give me the option right here to enter my product key so that when I hit “Activate Windows online now” it doesn’t fail.
In this post I’ll show you how to install Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 with Service Pack 1 on a Windows Server 2008 server. Install WSUS pre-requisites First, install the WSUS operating system pre-requisites. These pre-requisites are listed on the WSUS 3.0 release notes and can be installed using the ServerManagerCMD.exe command line tool. […]
I recently removed the Network Threat Protection component from the Symantec Endpoint Protection installation on all of the servers and desktops on a customer network. Here is a list of things that happened as a result: Backup throughput increased by 50% (using Symantec Backup Exec 11d) Exchange backups stopped failing due to the remote agent […]
