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A Student asked recently how to control wireless vs. LAN priorities in Windows 7. Wireless was being used, even when on the LAN. One absolute way to do this is by disabling the Wireless when connected to the LAN – but this requires vendor support – like in some Dell BIOS’ there’s an option to do this. But a simpler method may be to override the default interface metric used by IP on the wired or wireless interface. Here's the what and why and how: 

I woke up the other day only to discover I had a new certification attached to my name. But it was an old one too, MCSA! And who knows, perhaps you have too! Check your transcript!

You see, Microsoft has decided that the misunderstood era of the MCTS and the MCITP must come to an end. Let's face it, Certs get people jobs by first getting past the guard dogs of HR. And when a Monster.com searc...

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have easy template options for creating new documents based upon a sample file. Outlook, however, does not make it quite as easy! I needed to keep creating the same email on a daily basis, so here's what I did:

1. Create a sample file in Outlook:
   

I realized that I keep looking up these same links for students - so here they are for my (and your) convenience

The Microsoft Server Core 2008 / 2008 R2 Gettting Started Guide. Read it. Seriously.:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753802(WS.10).aspx

What's new in Server Core 2008 R2 - from Tech Ed 2009:

Here's a windows 2008 tidbit that only really matters if you are trying to enable wireless support on Server 2008 R2.

I had an issue with a 2008 installation that needed wireless support. I installed the relevant Windows 7 drivers, but it just wasn't kicking in. I discovered that the lack of support is specifically because the wireless “feature” is simply not enabled by default on server. This makes good sense - wireless is usually an undesired security risk on a server....

I got an email from a student who had a hard time reconciling some of the information he found in his Network+ Book and online. Here's an excerpt:

[In my Course Book is a list of] 10Gigabit Ethernet standards. Well on that list it has 10GBASE-SR and 10GBASE-SW. Both use Multi-mode fiber optic cable, but what I am unsure of is when it lists the distance of both types. It lists 10GBBase-SR as being 26 meters or 82 meters depending on cable type, and underneath that it lists 10GBase-SW...

One of the things I was most excited to see in SharePoint 2010 was the introduction of true relational lists. (Am I betraying my database background here or what?) 

Relational Lists seems like a no-brainer, since SharePoint's data is resident in a SQL relational database, right? Well, true though that is, the data for individual lists is NOT maintained in distinct tables. Instead they are grouped together into an "AllLists" table or an "AllLibraries" table. Weird huh?

The l...

Time is ticking away. Tick tick ticking away.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping... into the future...

Enough song references. Windows 7, like Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 before it, is a tool that takes its clock very seriously. What is it that all of these operating systems have in common? The ability to join an active directory domain that is secured by Kerberos, the authentication protocol named for the mythical 3-headed dog of the underworld that guard...

If you hard boot a system (bring it down without a proper shutdown) you will notice the system scanning the drive for you. What made that happen? Should you let it or skip it?

Here's the story. Every time Windows restarts, an application called Autochk.exe triggered by the Windows Kernal to scan each and every volume on the system to determine if the "dirty bit" is set. The dirty bit is a simple bit field that is flagged "on" at boot, and is flagged "off" at a normal shutdown. However, ...

A cowboy named 'Bud' was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"

I recently had a request to map a field that was being collected in an InfoPath form and stored as an XML file in a Forms Library in SharePoint to be rendered... well... as currency. InfoPath stores the data as a number that is formatted as currency, but since it is just a number, it comes accross as a number field, not a currency field. This means that the information in SharePoint doesn't look like it is holding monetary values, and the decimal places can get ugly real fast.

More than once, I've been asked a question that goes something like this:

"I've got some SQL 2000 databases that I want to bring into my new SQL 2008 environment. How do I bring them over? What's the trick?"

This is a great question, and a highly relevant one since Microsoft seems to be back on the 3 year rotation track for SQL version releases, meaning new versions of the server product and its databases.

The first thing to grapple wit...

A colleague at work posed me an interesting question this morning that went something like this, "I used to use the "Shrink one page" feature in Word 2007, but I can't find it in Word 2010... and ideas?"

So I found the feature in Word 2007 - which looks like this:

So I opened up Word 2010 confidently, knowing I would be able to track this beast down. 10 Minutes later, I ...

When you look at the "ipconfig" results of an IPv6 enabled interface, you might see the following

You should be able to spot the IPv6 information in the ipconfig results. (Look for the line items that mention "IPv6"!)  In this example, there is a statically configured IPv6 address in addition to the built-in Link-local address.

Unlike IPv4, where a co...

Therefore, I urge you, brothers,

in view of God's mercy,

to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,

holy and pleasing to God

--this is your spiritual act of worship.

When we think of worship, our minds may turn to liturgical ceremony or eccstatic praise.

Yet in the simplicity of Paul's writing worship is presented with crystal clarity.

Worship is sacrifice.

Luke 1:26-29

In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you." But she was greatly troubled at this statement, and kept pondering what kind of salutation this might be.

In verse 29 Mary, th...

So I needed a script so that after deploying a ghost image of Windows 7 the system would automatically rename itself uniquely. I was having some issues with sysprep, so this was my solution:

'-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

' First connect to the local computer and retreive local system properties

strComputer = "."

Set objNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")

My good friend and fellow trainer, Nick Jones, sent me the following "hey look at this" information:

"So the cluster sends out an ARP during failover and the clients update their local ARP cache pointing to the MAC of the new active node." I have also found that this RFC can be exploited when attackers initiate a reflective DOS by first employing an DOS attack on a valid server to overload it, then using ARP poisoning tools by sending a ARP broadcast packet contain...

Imagine that you have created a standard view on a set of tables. What would happen if you deleted a column of the underlying table (altering the view’s “schema”)?

I'll tell you what happened to me... the next time when I ran my view, it failed, because it was be missing needed columns!

Here is when SCHEMABINDING comes to the rescue. Creating a view WITH SCHEMABINDING locks the underlying tables and prevents any changes that may ch...

For those of you running Windows XP, I thought I would fling this little tidbit...

Applications in Windows XP support the ability to load using another account by right clicking and using Run As.

When supporting a user that has a hardware or software issue, there is often the necessity to perform actions using local Administrator rights. While applications and programs support Run As by ...