On day 2, the challenge continued with access management. This time, the video tutorial covered file permissions and how to query them using a variety of script commands. Very useful skills to have if you've ever tried to audit a file server where many people have had their hands in the pot. I didn't fare … Continue reading CQURE Academy 5-Day Challenge: Day 2
It's time to start preparing a new thick image for the computer labs. There are some interesting changes that need to be made this go-around, including a solution for Installing Office 2016 (VL, MSI) together with Visio and/or Project 2016 (click-to-run, C2R): Deadlocked, but I will write about that later. This post is about Visual … Continue reading Silent, Offline Install for Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise with MDT
CQURE is running an online challenge contest this week (May 8-12, 2017). I am participating and I will blog about the assessment challenge the day after the challenge. These are my notes and lessons learned from the first day challenge. The first day challenged my knowledge of security settings of Windows Services. You too might … Continue reading CQURE Academy 5-Day Challenge: Day 1
This seems simple enough... but I had to try a few methods to get it right. Note: the solution here is the one I settled on because it's the first one that worked for me. There probably are better solutions available. Feel free to comment if you have any. I settled on using Notepad++, my … Continue reading Removing the first n lines from all text files in a folder
SSMS 17 was released today. This is a quick first look at some of the additions and changes that immediately stand out to me.
There are several best practices in Operating System Deployment (OSD). One of those is to use "thin" (or reference) images, which would only contain a patched OS and probably the (patched) Office suite of your choice. After the thin image is applied, you apply the software needed for the device, including such mainstays as Flash … Continue reading Why I Use Thick Images for Lab Deployment
I don't post about my speaking engagements frequently enough. I realize I should do better and why not start today? I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Birmingham 2017 tomorrow, March 18. I have a single session titled "12 things to know about Azure SQL DB." I got started with Azure SQL DB about two … Continue reading Speaking at SQL Saturday Birmingham 2017
I ran into this problem today that didn't take a long time to resolve, but took me a little by surprise. Most of my SSIS packages use the Lookup transformation component to look up keys used in source systems and match them to the data warehouse. When SSIS packages fail at the Lookup component, the most common cause is that the source system's key does not exist in the data warehouse and must be added first. This time was different, however.
While the particular scenario I am describing here is likely common only at educational institutions, for those affected, it is a major showstopper. This blog post details the common licensing and deployment practices for higher education labs and the particular conundrum it causes with Office 2016 and Visio/Project 2016. I am proposing two workarounds that could help and one I've included just for completeness. I am calling on Microsoft to address the issue with a real fix.
Just sometimes, my wife needs some IT help. The latest occurrence is when she had scanned a number of documents to a TIFF file but really needed every page to be a single PDF file. We're talking a few dozen files with a few hundred pages each - a manual approach was not going to … Continue reading Using ImageMagick to simultaneously split and convert a TIFF into multiple PDFs
Sven Aelterman 