Basics
IPv4-Address

Basics: How To Find Your IP Address

Internet Protocol (IP) is the general basis for all communications on local and Internet networks. These communications rely on some basic numbers that identify you to other computers on the local network, and to the world. Those numbers put together are what’s commonly called an IP Address. On occasion, someone in you IT department or support might ask you to provide this number format, and  I’ll show you how to find it.

How-To
Dell 8TB

The Strange Case of Dell VRTX Hard Disk Compatibility [Solved]

Early June of this year, I ordered five more drives for a client’s Dell PowerEdge VRTX server enclosure, This in addition to the currently installed seven 2TB drives that were humming along just fine. My only request from Dell is that these drives be the biggest we can get, and that they be compatible with the VRTX enclosure. Simple, right? So we ordered the $8,000 in hard drives, and waited. The drives themselves would kick of a strange saga of failure and support that I can’t recall since working on another blade system, one made by IBM.

How-To
Office 2016 Logo

Your Guide to the Confusing Microsoft Office 2016 ‘My Account’ Service and How to Take Control

You might have wondered why licensing Retail versions of Microsoft Office 2016 on Windows has become so cumbersome and clunky and confusing? Why does Microsoft force a login to install and activate Office?  Why is this service so bad at showing information and handling more than one installation? If fact, if you have more than one retail copy of Office to install and activate on the same account, you’re in for serious confusion. I can’t answer all these questions, but I’ll show you how to fix this mess so you can install Office and move on.

How-To
Google Logo

Tips for Migrating Outlook on MacOS to Google’s Mail

When I was asked to move a customer’s 2000-odd contacts and 13 gigabytes of mail to Google’s cloud services from his MacOS-based computer, I knew this was going to be more than a challenge. To complicate matters, he had been using Outlook as a POP3 client of Google Mail and kept all his folders locally in Outlook 2011. From the beginning, I knew this was going to be an undertaking but I have some tips to help you face these particular challenges.

How-To
NS Featured Posts Code

Customize a Plugin to Control Your WordPress Theme’s Featured Posts

Wordpress. Incredibly customizable, but often incredibly frustrating. One such specific case is where themes can feature posts in a widget, but don’t always offer a way to set each post to do so. In my current theme’s case, it’s based on Orca and the theme has a “Featured Posts” widget, but there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to set a post as featured. I’ll show you how to modify a publicly available plugin to make this possible in Wordpress’ admin interface.

Basics
Dominican Republic Flag

Basics: Cell Phone & Data Access in the Dominican Republic

While in the Dominican Republic I made it my personal mission to gain data access on my smartphone. Over the years, this process has become easier as the companies have accommodated smartphone users. With an unlocked smartphone, you can get reliable and useful pre-paid cell phone and data access in the Dominican. I’ve learned a few things along the way that you’ll want to know if you plan to do this.

How-To
Windows Server Logo 2015

We’re Doing it Wrong: Creating an Active Directory Domain

It can be hard to admit that.We’re naming the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of an Active Directory domain either a valid name, or using .local TLD and these are both incorrect. Recently, when I was again tasked to build a small (200-ish user) Active Directory domain from scratch, I was again confronted about how wrong those of us in this industry have been. What’s even worse is that Microsoft has been recommending the “Right” way for 14 years!

How-To
Microsoft Exchange 2016 Logo

Exchange 2016 and Reducing Disk Usage on the Server’s Boot Drive

Every new version of Exchange Server seems to need more space on a server’s boot drive. Given that, you may be faced with building an Exchange Server and wish you had made the boot partition larger. Once it’s done, though, you can’t always take it back and reconfigure everything. Here, I have some strategies for redirecting drive use from an Exchange Server installed on C: to another, larger data drive.

How-To
Windows Server Logo 2015

Administrative Rights and Viruses

The pitch, as Karl Palachuk puts it, is that Windows users who are not locally administrative users cannot be infected with viruses. This is an absurd and wrong line of thinking from someone who professes to have been in the IT industry for more than 25 years. But, we can all be wrong, so I say own it Karl.

How-To
KeeWeb Dropbox Sign In

Integrating KeeWeb With Dropbox for Data Access [How-To]

By now, if you’re new to using KeeWeb, you should probably have read my really basic intro to getting KeeWeb working from a place you host. You may have decided to host it on your own server or computer, but I thought putting it in Dropbox was a good primer for what’s next: Integrating this tool into Dropbox’s API and using that for storage. This can seem really complicated at first look, but I’ll show you that it’s not as bad as you think.