The Geek Closet - Netfinity Project

I was rummaging around my geek closet....

You know you have one.  That dark little room crammed with discarded tech that you haven't touched in years but you "may have a use for someday."

In there I have a tapestry of my career in IT.  From bins of cables, cards and their associated connecting tissue to stacks of hardware long since retired to "someday" status.

Someday has come for you....

About 10 years ago while working for one of my clients during an upgrade project I purchased their soon to be unused and obsolete server hardware. 

I knew what I was getting into having actually installed these servers years before.  I had some vague ideas about what I'd do with them but nothing definitive.  

For all I knew they'd never be more than impromptu jack stands but I saw an opportunity even if I didn't know what fruit that would bear.

Within a few months I did manage to find a purpose for a few of them when I went into business with a friend of mine.  But after a year the business passed away into obscurity like so many others and they returned to the geek closet.

Until the other day.

I opened the geek closet and gazed upon these once mighty hunks of iron sadly sitting idle under stacks of similarly situated techno-cruft.

No, I needed, wanted, to do something with these servers and as luck would have it I was desperately searching for new content for my IT channel on YouTube.

Thus the Netfinity Project was born.  

It's a new video series that covers my attempt to re-purpose a couple of these old servers and gives you some insight into what I consider to be the golden age of hardware and IT.  From the late 90's to the early 2000's IT was all about the hardware and the only talk of "clouds" and "as a service" had to do with rain and valet parking. 

Hardware got better because the software demanded it.  Hardware is unquestionably better now but it lives in bland, clinical warehouses far from view.  An abstraction out of sight and out of mind.  

There's something sad about that.  I remember the pride of IT Manager's throwing open the doors of the server room.  This was where the magic happened, a tangible representation of the greatness of his enterprise.  Whirring, beeping, lights flashing and disks spinning.  You could almost feel the heartbeat of business within those cold server cases.

It's worth documenting and to some extent resurrecting if I can.

Thus the video series where I go through the highs and lows of making some old IBM Netfinity 5000's relevant again.

Check out this blog for regular updates on the video series.  The first few are below.  Enjoy!

Why Security will always fail

I just made a new video.  It's about rethinking how we approach security so I won't rehash it here.  Suffice it to say that the reason security measures fail is not due to a device or a piece of software.  It fails because we don't value the most critical element of any security policy; the people.

Couple that with the careless and needless collection of private information for purposes that have no justification for having it and you have a recipe for disaster.

Watch below...

Windows 10 Anniversary update: Your Last Chance Microsoft!

There are those in my profession that would call me unprofessional.  Others might even go so far as to say I'm just a disgruntled crank festooned with the requisite tin-foil hat when it comes to Microsoft Windows 10.

Here's the thing....

I don't care what you think.  I know what I've experienced and having spent most of my working career in the field losing countless hours to the cavalcade of flaws that is a new Microsoft OS I say with confidence...

Windows 10 is not an operating system, it's a delivery mechanism predicated on a marketing strategy.

I look at Windows 10 the same way I look at car commercials.  It's full of glitz, glamour and endless marketing campaigns with the sole intent of dangling shiny objects to distract you from it's intrusive and unreliable nature.

So yes, I've used it almost exclusively for a year, accepted the endless updates, 20 minute shutdown times and random lockups.  All with the intention of giving the OS a fair shake and hey the price was right.

In the intervening year between update 1607 and the launch of Windows 10 I've used the OS enough to find virtually no compelling reason to recommend it over Windows 7 for anything but support for the OS beyond 2020.

That Microsoft is now charging a minimum of $119 for the OS is an affront considering how much of a marketing platform Windows 10 is.

There are elements in Windows 10 that depending on the version are absolutely detrimental to an enterprise environment.  For example, in older versions of Windows you could get away with using a "Pro" version of Windows in your enterprise.  Yes, there were stripped down "Enterprise" versions only available to those with a Microsoft Licensing agreement but they were few and far between in my own experience.

A PRO version could connect to a Windows domain and allowed just as much control over the user experience.  The only caveat being a bit more overhead cruft inherited from its "consumer" roots.

Today a PRO version is much the same but unlike previous versions is subject to the "consumer" OS experience.   Meaning Microsoft and not your IT department is largely in control of the desktop experience in your enterprise.

Enterprise gives you all the control you used to have with "just" a PRO version but now you have to pay a subscription fee for that privilege.

I don't like that and I've taken active measures against that strategy including using SpyBot Anti-Beacon, refusing to connect my Microsoft account to the OS and denying the allure of the Microsoft Store.

Have you noticed that I've yet to say anything compelling about Windows 10?  That's because it's not and simply put there isn't anything compelling unless you work for Microsoft's marketing department.

Windows 10 is "probably" a better OS than its predecessors but you'll likely never see the benefit for all the cruft piled on top of it.  That's where the promise of the "Enterprise" versions come in but even they have been stained by the tarnish of a consumer OS.

So with the Anniversary update this is my last stand with Windows 10.  I expect many of my issues to be addressed or I'm jumping off the boat.  I could care less about "features" if they get in the way of what I'm trying to get done.

With that in mind I've documented my latest Windows 10 experience.  That being the installation and review of Windows 10 Anniversary update 1607.

I invite you to enjoy in 20 or so minutes what took me 2 1/2 hours.

Yammer's back. Microsoft updates the de facto social media client for the Enterprise

If you work in a company of any size chances are Microsoft technologies are the backbone of IT which means there's probably an Office 365 enterprise subscription.

Far removed from it's humble roots as a standalone productivity suite with Outlook's public folders as your primary collaboration source we now enjoy collaboration features that we'd never dreamed of back in the old days.

It really started with OneNote, then came SharePoint to extend the fun to other people and with acquisitions like Skype and Yammer, collaboration is almost a given in the modern enterprise.

But some features worked better than others and Microsoft has a bad habit of changing things without notice or letting features die on the vine.

For awhile it seemed like Yammer was going to be one of those withering features until recently. 

In case you didn't know...

Yammer is a private social networking service that allows communication and collaboration between users in the same enterprise.  Before the Microsoft acquisition access was limited to those within the same email domain.  Microsoft tightened that up by using AD membership but there was still work to do in the 2 years since it became part of Office 365.

Today a major update was announced that allows even tighter integration on windows domains as well as new collaboration features and on the admin end the ability to merge yammer user domains.  A handy feature with all those mergers and acquisitions going on in the corporate world. 

The video below comes from Microsoft and does a better job of explaining the updates to the service than I could.  

It's worth a look...

Desktop Video Capture with MSI Afterburner: Update - How to exclude interfering programs with RivaTuner

Way back in December of 2014 I made a video about capturing your desktop with MSI Afterburner 4.x.

For power users capturing your desktop on video isn't any big deal except when you discover that capturing game footage is very different from capturing a Powershell tutorial.  In short it won't happen without some tweaking.

The original video covered most of what you needed to know and to date is one of the most popular on my IT Mostly YouTube channel.  But it  soon became evident within a few weeks that people needed a little more.

Specifically, what to do when something gets in the way of Afterburner like say, Dropbox??

There were a lot of helpful comments for the original video.  So many, in fact that it was the inspiration for a follow-up.

Which is what you have before you now.

This short Update to the original Afterburner Desktop Capture shows how to exclude specific programs from interfering with video capture.

So without further delay, here's the update everyone was waiting for.

Online Job Boards suck

What the "experts" tell you is true.  Online job boards are a waste of time.  In fact I've NEVER gotten a job using an online job board.  I either knew someone, went directly to the company site or found out about the job some other way.

The video below shows just how useless sites like Monster.com and ZipRecruiter can be especially if you rely on them to give you updated job postings.

Watch and learn.

Take control of those nightmare technical interviews

I had a recent experience that was a perfect example of what it's like to go through a bad technical interview.

I say "bad" because the whole time I was there it was less about what I knew and more about trying to make me look like an idiot.

Yeah, I know there's such a thing as the hot seat and technical interviews are designed to be tough.  But we strayed from the technical into the psychological for no good reason other than one of the guys across the table from me just wasn't going to ever be a fan.  It became a game of minefields.

Thing is, I wasn't playing which just made the inquisitor across the table make more of an ass out of himself the longer it went on.

I've often said that the interview process is adversarial.  The premise being that you're either lying, unqualified or unworthy of being in the same room with a "guru."

In the video below I give you some pointers on how to get the best outcome you can without sacrificing your dignity in the process.

If you can, make a positive out of a negative.

Windows 10 alternative installation

So if you're like me and prefer to pick your own time to take the Windows 10 plunge then you're probably going to need some help when you finally push the go button.

That's because unlike most who'll take advantage of the free upgrade, disabling the automatic upgrade process requires a little more effort but no more than installing any other OS. It's still an upgrade so you still get to keep all your old apps ( so long as they're compatible.)

I haven't changed my position and the tight integration with Microsoft's ecosystem is ever present in Windows 10 but you can get around it.  In fact I'll be doing a series of videos in the near future on just how to minimize the amount of information you share.  

Microsoft may be taking a page from Apple's book with this latest version of the "one Windows to rule them all" mantra but for now it's more of an inconvenience than an Apple-like mandate.  

The reality of tech in the 21st century is that the more convenience you demand the more of your life you'll be asked to expose.  With Windows 10 it's still mostly your choice of how wide to open the Kimono but you need to know what you're buying into.  

For the most part, Windows users have gotten off easy with privacy but with an OS that's more connected than any previous version, it's high time we stop taking privacy for granted.  Look, if it's got a chip in it  somebody can hack it.  That's just the world we live in.  So make sure to clean up your act before upgrading to Windows 10.

That said, you may need some help when you finally do the upgrade.  That's what the series of videos below will show you.  I'll walk you through creating media for a manual install then using it to upgrade a Windows 7 Ultimate PC.

Check them out.  You'll find them a bit irreverent but likely similar to your own experience when you do upgrade.  

Cheap (as in free) desktop video capture

If you're anything like me you've found the need to capture your desktop activities more than once and the options out there tend to either be prohibitively expensive or woefully inadequate.  Being an IT guy AND an avid gamer I've been on both sides of the fence when it comes to trying to grab video from my desktop.

It's the whole desktop thing that's been a stumbling block.  That was until I figured out how to make a free video capture app, MSI Afterburner, grab my desktop and not just my game footage.

MSI Afterburner isn't just a video capture app, it's a unified suite of apps that include video card monitoring, tweaking and logging.  

Of course its video capture capabilities are geared toward gaming but a little digging found a simple solution to leverage the considerable muscle of Afterburner's video capture capabilities.  

Check out the videos below to see the secret I've unlocked....