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Warning:  What follows is a rant from the grumpy, old curmudgeon.  If hard truths make you squirm then you should go elsewhere … //START RANT I was out walking The Beagle this morning (Samantha, if you must know) and I passed a car from an IT firm from another town.  Their tagline was “Taking the …

This is a little bit of a rant, so be prepared. I have lost count of the number of times I come across people in the “biz” who tell clients, or anyone else who will listen, that replication is the same as backup.  It most emphatically is not!  To tell somebody that is to tell …

No, this is not an article about weird marketing practices or “ponzi” schemes within the A/V industry.  It IS an article about how you can better protect yourself against viruses and malware.  I decided to write this after one of our customers had the willies scared out of them by one of their other vendor’s …

… and, no, it is NOT the reason you might think! I’ll let you in on a little secret, the vast majority of us technical types HATE email!  Why???  Because it causes more grief than almost any other application out there!  And, no, it’s not because email can be the harbinger of “really bad things” …

One of the things that can drive your poor scribe nuts is a “dirty” AD.  I have lost count of the number of customers I’ve been at, large and small, where the AD is a total dog’s breakfast.  The upshot is it becomes pretty hard to provide any sort of effective management of their systems …

OK, right up front I have to state that either Ballmer & Co are absolutely brilliant OR the lot of them have been smoking copious amounts of crack somewhere on the Redmond campus.  I have started to noodle about with Windows 8 (the Consumer preview) and I have to say that I’m kind of leaning …

Yes, it’s true!  It actually costs real money to provide a solid IT infrastructure.  And the corollary is that it actually costs real money to support an IT infrastructure, as well. I have been in the biz for over 30 years and while I was willing to cut people slack way back when in terms …

I’ve just spent 3 hours troubleshooting an ESXi 5 host that had the problem with VERY slow boot when using software iSCSI connections to the SAN.  VMware has released a patch that supposedly fixed the problem.  Well, I’m here to tell you that it has made ZERO difference to the machine in question; in fact, …

I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s SBS products.  I got into SBS in a big way with the release of SBS 2003 and installed quite a number at various client’s in the Lower Mainland.  At itgroove the trend continued and we’ve had good success with SBS 2008. SBS has always been a fabulous value proposition …