Welcome to Brendon Davis

WHS – Server Recovery

Autor brendon | 27.02.2009 | Category HomeServer, TechStuff

I’m not sure if I have posted how much I like Windows Home Server…

Last week I was having trouble with the OS, easy fix I figured. Drop the DVD in, run the upgrade install and everything is back to normal. One problem, the disk I was using had a CRC error and failed half way through the install.

Burning another install disk, I ran the setup again only to find that it could not detect the failed install and only gave me the option to format all my disks and start from scratch again. Sure I could move my data off the system disk and go through the painful process of importing all my media again, but then I would also lose my PC backups and stuff. What to do??

Long story short, I fired up a copy of ghost and imaged the 30GB D:\ partition from my system disk onto another drive. Disconnected all drives apart from the system disk and ran the clean install. Once that had finished, plugged back in the disks,  restored the original D:\ partition from ghost and ran the upgrade install again.

Once again I have a clean updated server with all my previous PC backups.

WHS ROCKS!!!

CITRIX Branch Repeater – Advanced Options

Autor brendon | 04.02.2009 | Category CITRIX, TechStuff

CITRIX have a neat new product available for WAN Optimisation that works hand-in-hand with their WANScaler range of products. Designed for those sites that have too many staff for *just* a WAN link and not enough to warrant an onsite Server.

The Branch Repeater is a little 1RU server designed for a standard COMMS rack, which apart from applying CoS policies and compressing traffic flowing through other WANScalers runs Windows Server 2003 R2. So you can configure it to host DHCP, DNS, WINS, DC, GC, Printer Shares, FRS, etc.

A little known fact is that pressing Ctrl + Alt + W will bring up additional debugging options on the BranchRepeater system tray icon.

Personally I don’t know why they hid it, just means people like me who have to install and support these lives are that little bit harder..

BitLocker Command Line

Autor brendon | 04.02.2009 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

Now I know this is posted in several other locations. Since I have started playing around with BitLocker, I cannot for the life of me remember the command line. So here it is:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\cscript manage-bde.wsf -help

Enjoy