Category Archives: General

2015 02 01 21 21 48

Invited to speak at North West England VMUG – 25th February 2015

General, VMware, , ,

Great news, I’ve been invited to speak at the North West VMUG on the 25th February. And there is a raffle for a iPad Air 2 and nVidia K2 Graphics card. (That’s the selling points of why to come covered).

The VMUGs are great, you usually get some free training, a couple of vendors taking about their products, with less of a sales slant. And someone from the community taking about their real experiences. For the North West VMUG, Nathan and Steve both put a lot of effort into the agenda ensuring a day that will cater to most, and ensure there is always something you can take away.

This means they put a heavy focus on the people who turn up, and what they want. Which personally, when I attend, is not the usual sales talk about a product. Take the last event for example, Trend where there talking about how great their product is and the fact it beats everyone else. However there was an opportunity to really grill the speaker, who was a techie just like me. I was able to get down to the nitty gritty about trend’s worldwide connected features to detect and block threats in near real-time. The speaker also detailed about one of their biggest customers, and the challenges faced, and how by implementing trend helped them. Rather than the usual, this product is used by 40% of Fortune 500 companies.

Where do I fit in?

shutterstock_presentation

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veeam 2014 logo color tag

Veeam Hidden Feature – Backup Validator

General, VMware, , , , , , ,

So the other day I was using the Veeam Backup Extractor Tool, located in the installation folder, when I noticed another .exe file that I hadn’t paid attention to previously.

  • Veeam.Backup.Validator.exe

This a CLI based tool, and does exactly as the name suggests, validates backups.

You can access it by running command prompt;

  •  CD “C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup”
  • Veeam.Backup.Validator.exe and your arguments(to see the full options, see at the bottom)

This is a handy little tool for validating the backup files, and can probably be scripted as well. However unlike the SureBackup feature, it will not guarantee that once the files have been restored, the Virtual Machine’s operating system is intact and in a working condition.

An example of its use

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read

Blog posts I’ve been reading and sharing recently

General, , , ,

Since before the Christmas break, I’ve not had a great deal to write about, in terms of break fix, as I’ve been busy studying to pass my CCNP exams, and now I’m under way with taking on further exams.

At the same time, I’ve also found some of my posts appearing on a daily round-up of blog posts on Michael White’s site notesfrommwhite.net. So I’ve decided to do something similar, sharing links to some of the content I’ve found interesting and content I’ve been sharing at work recently.

This won’t be a regular thing they’ll I’ll be doing, but more ad-hoc, as I find that the tabs on my laptop and phone fill up quickly with a plethora blog posts which peak my interest, usually found on twitter, so this is what I’ll be sharing.

The Posts and Sites

First off, you need to check out Michael White’s website, found some great stuff through his newletters;

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visio networks

How to produce good documentation – Part 4 – Diagraming a network

General, Networking, , , , ,

So in my last post, I looked at how to record the logical information about your IP addresses and switchport locations, making it easier for troubleshooting in the future.

Now lets tackle the big one, how to produce good documentation when diagraming your network.

For this, I am going to use a real world example of a network I audited, and then made a visio diagram. Personally, I don’t believe this is one of the best visio diagram’s I have produced, however it includes a lot of various parts which I think are useful.

So below, you find the original hand drawn diagram as I was tracing cables and devices, and then the final product.

Note: Unfortunately I do not have the Visio file available for distribution used in this post.

The diagram

original diagramNetwork Diagram

Starting off

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