Final lab setup mid-2019 to now

Last year, I must have got a bit excited with the new gear I was buying, and I never ended  up posting my final CONFIG, here it is! 3x HP EliteDesk 800 G3’s (product page) Each of the HP Elitedesk 800 G3s contains the following hardware: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz 4x 16 GB

You down with PDQ? (ya you know me)

Anyone working in the EUC field has probably pulled out some or ALL of their hair when trying to deploy software via Microsoft’s dreaded SCCM tool What if I told you there was a better way? That’s assuming of course, you’ve not heard of PDQ Deploy https://www.pdq.com/pdq-deploy/ I’m late to the PDQ game! I had

CVAD 1912 UPL removal issues and fix

I noted some interesting (annoying?) unexpected behavior with UPL-enabled CVAD 1912 MCS master image machines over the weekend when I should have been playing DOOM ETERNAL At a client site , we un-installed CVAD 1912 to remove the UPL components. We did this for two reasons 1 – A default install of CVAD 1912 w

IGEL Disrupt 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee and my next tech conference

It seems my vacation schedule is mostly driven by tech conferences these days.  E2E in NY in 2018 Synergy in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019 IGEL Disrupt in Nashville, TN in 2020 All of which is great, as none of the above places i’d been to before, and each trip was exciting for personal and professional

Citrix UPL and FSLOGIX – the best of both worlds

I’ve been working with Citrix technology for 7 years, and most of that time has been working in the slow-moving world of financial industry ITThat being said, I left that world last summer, to work for a small company here in Quebec, called ProContact.ca. I wanted to focus on SMB, where I felt I could

QUIET! Simple powershell code to set current_user / default_user reg keys to "NONE"

I think for every PC i’ve used /worked on over the past 20 years, the first thing I do after logging on is set the “system sounds” to NONE. I don’t need beeps for every time I fat-finger windows + R or whatnot. I recently re-installed Win 10 on my personal laptop, and wanted to

Not all NVM drives are created equal!

Over the weekend, I learned the hard way what happens when you deviate from Vmware’s HCL list.Many months back, I’d decided on HP EX920 1TB NVM drives for my home lab ESXI 6.7 U1 hostsFor reference, the hardware for my hosts is level-set as follows:HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF (not on vmware HCL)Intel Core i5-6500 CPU

Home lab upgrade log – April 26, 2019: "New" IP KVM switch has arrived!

In my last post on the topic of home lab upgrades, I’d stated I was going to use Intel Q370 based mobo’s to satisfy a long-standing need for IPMI/OOB/Lights-out mgmt of my various virtualization hosts That plan has now changed, as I’ve deiced to go with a more scalable solution that won’t lock me in

Home lab upgrade log April 11, 2019

Last year, I bought a few new used HP computers via eBay to build-out my VMware lab setup -A EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF – which has a Intel core i5 6500 CPU, non-hyper threaded!-A HP Prodesk 400 G3 mini – which has a Intel core i5 6500T CPU, non-hyper threaded! This is the 2nd of

New year’s resolutions don’t work

As per the title of this post, I don’t believe in new year’s resolutions. Any date you can put a “magic” start time on, is a date you can prepare a dozen excuses not to make once the date comes up.That’s why I like to make changes all year around: this week, it was cycling