Mini Brain Dump: IP Subnet Change Considerations

I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time, and intended to write a more detailed description.

Here are some things you may need to consider (outside of the obvious like DHCP scopes, DNS server settings, Firewall settings & rules, etc) when changing the IP range your Windows network operates on:

  • TCP/IP Printer ports on print server
  • Printer/Copier IP/DNS/SMTP settings
  • Exchange allowed relay ranges
  • Any copy/print accounting devices attached to copiers
  • Monitoring host settings. Eg. Big Brother/Hobbit - Both client and server side, if not configured to use DNS in config files
  • Server iLO IP addresses

Some steps for changing domain controller IP addresses. Do these first before any other important servers:

  1. Change IP
  2. ipconfig /flushdns
  3. ipconfig /registerdns
  4. Either restart the Netlogon service, or run ‘nltest /dsregdns’
  5. Reboot

Disclaimer: This is by no means a complete list. Use these directions at your own risk.

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mRemote: A Remote Connections Manager

This tool should be a part of any self-respecting SysAdmin’s toolkit. mRemote is “a full-featured, open source, multi-tab remote connections manager”.

What does this mean?, you say. It means you’ve got one neat console where you can manage all your remote connections in one place. mRemote currently supports these protocols:

I haven’t set it up fully yet, but it will be really handy to have all my web-based admin areas and SSH to Linux boxes in there too.

mRemote

A side note, it uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, so some web-based admin pages may not display properly. This, however is no fault of mRemote or Firefox’s.

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Update: Deploying MYOB Premier via MSI

I recently figured out a better way to get MYOB Premier to deploy via MSI that the previous method that I posted. This method basically stops the MSI from checking if it’s been run by a bootstrapper (Setup.exe). I’ve tested this with Premier 11 and 12 and it deploys fine on XP and Vista.

Continue reading ‘Update: Deploying MYOB Premier via MSI’

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CakePHP Code Snippet: Return only fields with values to the DB upon saving.

This code goes in {ModelName}::beforeSave:

foreach ($this->data[$this->name] as $key => $value) {
    if (!set::classicExtract($this->data,$this->name . '.' . $key)) {
        $this->data = set::remove($this->data,$this->name . '.' . $key);
    }
}

I use it where the DB may be expecting values for certain fields that are optional in the UI, and therefore may be returned empty by the controller.

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Vista on Asus Z71V

The (Built on) Asus Z71V was released in 2005, so it’s not a Vista "certified" notebook. Z71That aside, I replaced my "in need of a rebuild" XP Pro install with a fresh Vista install. Audio and Video drivers didn’t work out of the box. For video, you can just select the out-of-the-box Nvidia 6600 driver.

For audio, I downloaded the driver directly from the Realtek website. All the drivers you need, however, are linked from this page: NotebookReview.com - Asus Vista 32/64 Drivers

Surprisingly, the ATK driver, OSD and hotkey utilities work nicely. They’re certainly fancier than the old XP version that came with the Z71 from the factory.

When I bought this notebook I specced it up to the max, so it’s not surprising that it runs Vista reasonably well. Keeping in mind that this is a fresh rebuild, I’m now logged on and looking at the desktop (and able to click the Start menu) only 1 minute after powering up.cpu-z_z71-vista

I’m a little suspicious that something fishy is going on with my CPU clock  speed. I’ve set Power4Gear (and Vista’s power management before that) to use maximum CPU speed, and it sits at 1600MHz, even though it’s a 2100MHz CPU. I’ve tried my registered version of Notebook Hardware Control, but that had some bugs.

This gives me a Vista performance score of 3.4, with the limiting factor being the CPU. It’s still a decent score, but I believe it should be higher.

Performance Score

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