If you have ever wanted a certification in buzzwords, here is your opportunity. A lot of people are critical of CompTIA certifications with opinions that they are too easy or too general. I think they are good stepping stones for people interested in IT, particularly A+ and Network+. If you are interested in outsourcing some of your server load, you can turn to "the cloud". … [Read more...]
Using Group Policy Preferences to push Konica Minolta Account Track passwords
Depending on the organization, a department might be interested in using the account tracking feature of certain copiers. This would allow an organization to track and calculate a bill per PIN Code. This could allow an individual or a department to be billed individual for their printing at the end of the billing cycle. Beyond the business need, for a lot of people the PINs … [Read more...]
Using Google Chrome to create a kiosk
A recent task that came across my desk included the sysadmin side of setting up a public-use kiosk. The web developers would handle everything regarding the kiosk experience but it was my responsibility to ensure the environment was secure and controlled. The web developers preferred to use Google Chrome to allow them to use more HTML 5 functionality and better transitions … [Read more...]
A crash course on understanding Group Policy
One of my main responsibilities at my job is managing our Group Policy. It works best with a well thought out structure in Active Directory but you should have that anyways for organization purposes. I'll often hear discussions or see comment threads of new IT Professionals wanting to move to centralized management. They might have just gotten the hang of AD structure but … [Read more...]
A script to delete mapped network drives using a certain UNC path
Mapped drives. You can love 'em or hate 'em. After changing file servers or retiring an old server, clients might have old mapped drives pointing to these servers. Since they could be a confusing interface and disconnected drives might slow down the computer until they time out, it's not a bad idea to clean up the old ones. It's a pretty simple process to disconnect a mapped … [Read more...]