The last Friday in July is reserved to be SysAdmin Appreciation Day. So to all IT professionals out there, Happy SysAdmin Day for 2012! With Black Hat/DEFCON conferences going on this week and all SysAdmins nervously watching for patches along with the Olympics starting today, the event almost slid by without notice. Of course, the SysAdmin Day website was working to keep the … [Read more...]

It's been a little while since I had to create a mandatory profile. I have done it on Windows XP computers at previous organizations and clients but with a new organization actually using Windows 7, the situation has finally come about for a lab/kiosk environment that could make use of a mandatory profile. To refresh myself, I gathered a few resources on the topic. … [Read more...]

ODBC connections in Windows (found as "Data Sources (ODBC)" in the Control Panel, under Administrative tools) are required for connecting an application to a database through a database driver. When configured, they can hum along just fine and work splendidly as long as they don't change and the connection details on the database-side do not change. They can be complicated … [Read more...]

There are things with Windows 8 that I look forward to and things I dread. The Windows 8 App Store is somewhere in the middle with potential pain and positives waiting in the wings. The answer to this will depend on how much control the enterprise is given over the App Store through Group Policy. Win8 things I'm looking forward to: More drivers included in the initial … [Read more...]

Google Apps has added the ability to synchronize and manage passwords between Microsoft Active Directory and Google Apps. This allows an organization's password policy to be used for Google Apps accounts. The new method moves away from additional user attributes in an LDAP environment to use something called Google Apps Password Sync (GAPS). … [Read more...]