Category Archives: Systems Administration

Microsoft Ignite – Day 0 (Monday) & Day 1 (Tuesday)

Monday Got down Monday afternoon – checked into hotel, took husband out for lunch. The giantest schnitzel I’ve ever seen, at Koi. Once he’d bailed back to Brisbane, unpacked (I don’t travel light >.>) and then decided to head over to go through registration before the hoards descended. Registered, got my bag, got to the traffic lights to head to… Read more »

AGPM aka change management for GPO’s

AGPM (Advance Group Policy Management) is pretty much a change management tool for group policy – it assists in deploying new policies, modifying existing policies and being able to roll-back to older versions if something has gone wrong! I’m a big fan of AGPM simply from the point of view of being able to see a) who’s done what and… Read more »

Documentation & Planning – the sneaky skills

One of the biggest issues I’ve come across with the places I’ve worked (and the people I’ve worked with!) is lack of ability to document and to plan. It seems that this is a much maligned and skipped skill that many just don’t have. This post is about how I do my documentation and planning, which I hope could help… Read more »

Would you ask a doctor for free advice? Would you ask a mechanic to “just take a quick look”?

I’m not going to get too much into the back story of this, because it’s not completely necessary and it’s not nice – and don’t feel like having defamation brought against me! There was a recent situation I found myself in where I was at a business as a client and mentioned I worked in IT while there consuming said… Read more »

Windows 10 – UPDATE ALL THE THINGS!

So, Windows 10 was recently released, so I decided to be brave, dive in and update all of my machines within the first few days of it being available for general download. This will be a quick overview of how my updates went and the pitfalls I encountered. I’ll give some basic specs (if I know them!) so that those… Read more »

Ranty pants engaged – Sexism in tech: Deepdive

[WARNING, WARNING – DANGER <INSERT NAME HERE>: This is going to be a very stream-of-consciousness rant and is going to be a mixture of my ranty-pants being firmly engaged in regards to this issue and expanding on some of the points I made in a particular Reddit post] So, not long ago, I posted a link to TableFlip.Club to a tech… Read more »

Pearls of Wisdom from my 2003 Decommissioning

For those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you would have undoubtedly seen the posts regarding Server 2003 EoL and my battles with my organisation (primarily the service and business owners of the servers) about getting off this out-dated OS and onto something more recent – or in a number of cases, just getting rid of a no-longer-required server… Read more »

Taking on higher duties – being the manager of your own team…

For those who don’t know the back-story – my manager was lucky enough to get 6-7 weeks of leave and buggered off to Europe. Yay for him, boo for us poor sods left behind. Because he was going away for such a significant period of time, he figured the team *should* have a manager – so he kindly asked me… Read more »

Do you need formal qualifications to be a sysadmin?

Thought I’d write this to get my two-cents out there. As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, I feel like I’m in a good place to put this out for discussion. I see a number of sysadmins who feel they aren’t “good enough” because they have no formal qualifications. They feel “less than” because they don’t… Read more »

Getting certified – my experience getting my MCSA

I lurk on Reddit. A lot. I mainly sit in the /r/sysadmin subreddit, because there are quite a number of interesting articles and discussions that come out of it. One discussion that appears to come up far more often than most is certifications. What are the good ones to get, how to get them, good study materials, how to ensure… Read more »