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Author Archives: Bjorn Houben

Apple – Notes / summary for the “Mac Integration Basics 10.8 Exam”

People that know me, know that I’ve mainly been working with Microsoft my whole life. Lately however, I’ve been working with an Apple MacBook Pro with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion however and I intend to  enough knowledge and experience to get the following certifications:

  • Apple Certified Associate – Mac Integration 10.8
  • Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) 10.8
  • Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) 10.8

So keep an eye on my blog if you want to learn more about Apple’s Mac OS X and its certifications. Read more about other Apple certifications on their Training and Certification page.

The “Mac Integration Basics 10.8 Exam”

For people new to Mac and OS X, Apple offers the Associate certification for Mac Integration. This covers OS X basics and describes options to integrate OS X into an existing (Windows) environment. The exam costs $65 and can be taken online.

Even though the guide that Apple provides isn’t that big to begin with, I decided to summarize it anyways. I hope it is useful to someone else as well.

Also if you want to get more in-depth knowledge about OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, check out this great book: Apple Pro Training Series: OS X Support Essentials. Before purchasing, you might also want to look for coupon codes as it might save you 30% off or more.

Notes / summary for the “Mac Integration Basics 10.8 Exam”

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Posted by on January 27, 2013 in Apple, ICT, Learning, OS X

 

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Office 365 – Exchange Online mailbox Default MRM Policy might result in unwanted loss of mail

While I was studying for the 74-324 exam, I was reminded that by default the “Default MRM Policy” will be applied to a new mailbox (when you enable archiving)..

Very simply put, some items will be deleted or archived after a specific period of time. By example, files in your deleted folder will be removed after 30 days. This is unexpected for most people who are used to be able to browse their “deleted items” indefinitely.

Personally, I don’t want this to be automated because I want to be completely in control of my mail items. Especially considering the very large mailbox sizes with Office 365 (and even unlimited size for some subscription plans) I have disabled this “Default MRM Policy”.

You can set/disable the retention policy either using PowerShell or using the web interface by going to the mailbox, details, retention policy and selecting no policy.

Also if you want to know more about archiving, take a look at a couple of blog posts created on Techdom.nl by my colleague Dominique Hermans.

PS:Also take a look at this great post discussing backups, recovering deleted items and why you might want to enable litigation hold: http://www.spaceage.co.za/blog/technical/office-365-backup-data/. Also take a look at this article covering single instance recovery: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/hh125820.aspx.

 

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Windows 8 – Last chance to use the Windows 8 Upgrade Offer and to get the free Windows 8 Media Center Pack

Last chance ….

At the 31st of January these special Windows 8 related offers are ending:

This means that the Windows 8 (Pro) upgrade will be much more expensive:
http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/01/18/update-on-windows-8-pricing.aspx

On the Microsoft Store it looks like it’s current upgrade price of 30 euros will become 280 euros.
So even if you don’t need/want Windows 8 yet, it might be worth considering to just buy it right now.

For more information, including how to perform a clean install when you’ve bough the upgrade, please check my previous post.

 
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Posted by on January 25, 2013 in Microsoft, Windows, Windows 8

 

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Windows 8 – Running Windows 8 from USB stick or USB hard disk using Windows To Go (WTG)

Summary of what Windows To Go (WTG) is

In short, Windows To Go is a Windows 8 Enterprise feature that allows you to boot and run Windows 8 from a USB flash drive (USB stick).

Potential reasons and scenarios for using Windows To Go

There are many potential reasons and scenarios for using Windows To Go, but here are some of them from the top of my head:

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Posted by on January 24, 2013 in ICT, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 2012, Windows 8

 

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Home LAB – How to use Windows 8 Client Hyper-V and VMware Workstation on the same machine

In yesterday’s post I described that for my purposes it was still necessary to run VMware Workstation sometimes despite having Client Hyper-V installed on my Windows 8 machine.

What you have to keep in mind though, is that you’re already running a hypervisor when you have Client Hyper-V installed in Windows 8. Installing and running VMware Workstation might cause problems. So unfortunately you cannot run them at the same time. This is also true for other virtualization products like by example virtualbox.

As a workaround you can either uninstall or (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. When you want to switch between Hyper-V and VMware Workstation it is ofcourse best to just temporarily disable Hyper-V.

In this forum post, a couple of methods are described to (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. It includes creating a seperate boot menu entry to boot with Hyper-V disabled and modifying the setting either through registry or a command. All methods do require a reboot however.

PS:

  • This kind of configuration is ofcourse not supported and should only be used for testing purposes in non production environments.
  • Depending on both your hardware and what your planning to do, you might also want to consider:
    • Running VMware ESXi from a USB stick
    • Running Windows 8 from a USB stick with Windows To Go (WTG).
  • It should also work on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 and up, but I haven’t tested it.
 

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Event – Free Microsoft IT Camps

On a regular basis Microsoft and its partners host Free IT Camps. In the past I’ve blogged about them because I really think they’re a good way to quickly get up-to-date on products and technologies. Besides that it’s also a good way to get to know other people.

On the Microsoft Events website you can see which future events are available and not just IT Camps events.

Also should you not be able to attend an IT Camp, for Server 2012 you can also use IT Camps On-Demand.

 

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Powershell – Get GPO Report for an Active Directory domain

Sometimes you want to be able to quickly create a GPO report for an Active Directory domain. And ofcourse you can do this manually using the GUI as well, but with a PowerShell script you can automate and schedule it.

So here’s my script that will automatically save a time stamped GPO report for the current domain.

 

Powershell – Get Percentage of Pysical and Virtual Servers from your VMware and Cisco UCS combined for each location

In a previous blog post I’ve already shown this script that use PowerCLI to get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment for each Virtual Center server. This script however only took into account ESX hosts and VM’s in each Virtual Center server separately.

This means that:

  • The UCS blades weren’t taken into account as physical servers.
  • No percentage was being calculated for each physical location.

This new script automates determining for each location the number of physical and virtual servers in VMware vSphere and Cisco UCS.

PS: You can get more detailed information from the script, but it has been disabled using comments by default.

 

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PowerShell – Get UCS Blade Count

PowerShell has been adopted by many companies already including VMware and Cisco with its Unified Computing System (UCS).

This simple script will use the Cisco UCS PowerTool to connect to UCS and determine the blade count for each UCS server you’ve defined.

 

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