Cisco ASA to Redundant Amazon Virtual Gateways

As part of my day to day duties as a “Systems Administrator”, I configure site-to-site VPN tunnels from my company’s hosted devices, to remote endpoints of all types. The most common scenario being IPSec VPN tunnels, with the endpoints on my side being a Fortigate and Cisco ASA devices. Our team has done well over…

Windows 8.1 RTM Installation Guide

It’s official, Windows 8.1 RTM is available. Microsoft’s original intention was to hold the RTM of Windows 8.1 until October General Release; however, the development and overall technical community outcry has somewhat forced them to relent and release the RTM build early, almost in a business-as-usual fashion. Using virtualization client software, I setup a test Windows 8.1 ENT edition VM. I have some suggestions about Windows Update settings, and I also join my HomeGroup and setup File History (think Time Machine for Windows). Below is a step-by-step guide and a look at the installation process. This guide utilizes the Microsoft Account login and not a traditional local account. Pro-Tip – If you are using a VM, make sure to not use NAT (share IP with host) and to use a Bridged connection. Otherwise features like HomeGroup and other network settings can be problematic in my experience. Here we go:

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MS TechEd 2013

This year I was given the opportunity to attend and experience TechEd North America in New Orleans June 2-6. This was my first time attending and I was not quite sure what to expect. Could the assembling of so many nerds in one city be a good idea? As it turns out, this is an awesome idea.

 

The trip didn’t get off to the smoothest start. On Sunday I was set to take a flight from Charlotte > Houston > New Orleans. Unfortunately the flight departing Charlotte was delayed for 30 minutes and ended up being about two hours delayed in total. When you’ve got a connecting flight, the last thing you want is a delay of your first flight; however, during this time I started making conversation with the only other person headed to New Orleans, who was also heading to TechEd. I was chatting with Brien Posey. I didn’t know it at the time, but he is a 10-time MVP and freelance technical writer. We had a nice conversation, he’s a great guy, and after looking around a bit I’ve read some of his articles I just didn’t place the name with the articles when we were talking.

 

The flight from Houston > New Orleans was also delayed, but when we landed I only had 20 minutes to catch the flight, no time for lunch! Once aboard I jumped in on a conversation between Brien and a Duke Energy employee, turns out the Duke Employee knows a good friend of mine who also works at Duke in Charlotte on the Active Directory team. It’s a small world. Before I knew it I was in New Orleans and getting dropped off at the Renaissance Pere Marquette.

MDT VBScript Runtime Error 13

I ran into an issue the other day while deploying a new VM in our Server 2012 development Hyper-V environment. I went through the new VM creation wizard, setting my folder paths, NIC, default memory at 512MB. I also specified that I wanted to install my OS via network installation in the wizard as I…

Migrate from VMware VMs to Hyper-V Windows 8

In a previous post I described how to setup Hyper-V on your Windows 8 desktop. If you decided to install Hyper-V on your Windows 8 desktop, but you have VMware VMs you want to run on this same machine, you’ll be unable to import VMDK files into Hyper-V and you’ll also be unable to install…

Hyper-V on Windows 8

This Blog post is based on the RTM version of Windows 8 desktop. One of the features that I am excited about with the Windows 8 desktop, is the ability to run a full-fledged Hyper-V virtual environment natively. I am a Systems Administrator by trade, and I constantly need to setup virtual machines (VMs) on…