James Nimmo

Category: Blog

  • Installing the SQL from SBS 2008 Premium along side SBS 2003

    Background: SBS 2003 Premium is running on one box. Performance is becoming poor due to increasing SQL demands, so we need to run it on a separate server. Can achieve this by purchasing A) SBS Workgroup 1 Processor Edition, or B) SBS 2008 Premium Edition & 25 CALs, (which entitles you to run SQL on…

  • Configuring Cisco 7914 Sidecar

    So you’ve got your shiny new 7914 sidecar, configured all the buttons, go to boot it up and find that all the buttons just light up red! I’ve seen many forum posts with people confused about how to get their 7914 working, and I have also had problems, so here is a guide on how to…

  • Graduation

    On this twenty-third day of April 2010, I was duly admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. No storm troopers like at my fiancee’s graduation,  however there was someone in chainmail a few rows in front of me. Thanks UC, great feeling to finally be a graduate! Look forward to doing…

  • Server 2008 Web Edition & Sharepoint Foundation 2010

    I presumed it was a given that Sharepoint would be able to run on Server 2008 Web Edition, however I was mistaken, and found out the hard way when the prerequisite installer wouldn’t work on a shiny new VM. The prerequisite installer was failing immediately when trying to setup the IIS role, giving the message…

  • Summer IT Projects

    My last exam is all done and dusted, marking the completion of my B.Sc in Computer Science! No time to pat myself on the back for that just yet however. Here is a list of IT projects I’ll be likely working on for the next couple of months. Hopefully I’ll be able to cross most…

  • Making Age of Mythology work in Parallels

    Now I’m not a gamer, but I do like to have the occasional multiplayer game of Age of Mythology or Age of Empires. When I purchased the upgrade to Parallels 4 earlier in the year I was disappointed to find Age of Mythology wouldn’t run on it. You wil get the error message “This graphics…

  • IPv6

    I’ve been playing around with IPv6 over the last few days; my ISP doesn’t give out IPv6 addresses yet, but thanks to Hurricane Electric I now have a /48 being routed straight to me. In theory I could subnet that /48 into 65536 subnets, each containing a ridiculous number of hosts. This is a strange…

  • Affordable IP Phone Systems

    Asterisk has been around for a number of years now, most tech consultants will be aware that there are open source PBX solutions that can run on your PC. However, until I discovered the Atcom IP series of Asterisk appliances, I knew I would have a hard time convincing small businesses of the benefits of…

  • DNS Performance Test Utility

    Recently I have been trying to tune the internet performance at work (and find out whether it is faster to run a DNS forwarder on our VPS hosted in a data centre, or to do queries directly to OpenDNS), and found this cross-platform tool which looks very useful for checking out query speeds of different…

  • Sysprep, Standard PC, ACPI, Ghost Images

    NEVER try creating a ghost or sysprep image with your source computer’s HAL set to Standard PC! I wish I had noticed this critical point in documentation earlier: You can deploy a Sysprep image created on a computer that uses a Standard PC, Non-ACPI PIC HAL (Hal.dll) to a computer that uses the following HAL types:  •…