James Nimmo

Category: Tech

  • Security Tip: Block Internet Explorer invocation of Java with Group Policy

    Given the non-stop barrage of security vulnerabilities being found and exploited in Java, every Systems Administrator should disable Java for Internet Explorer or have a really good reason not to. (Don’t worry, we can still cater for you if you have specific sites that require Java!) Unfortunately it is notoriously hard to do. Microsoft had…

  • Avaya SIP Trunking with 2talk New Zealand

    SIP Trunking is a great option to lower the cost of your phone calls. We installed a new Avaya IP Office 500 phone system at the beginning of last year, so of course I was keen to get VoIP setup quickly through 2talk to cut the cost of calls going over our ISDN lines. The Avaya…

  • Avaya IP Office New Zealand Dial Plan (ARS)

    Here is the Avaya ARS dial plan we are using with our 2talk SIP trunk. Please note the following: Line group 0 is our PSTN group, you’ll see below emergency calls and Telecom service numbers are set to go over PSTN. Freephone numbers also go over PSTN because they are free. 3XXXXXX & 9XXXXXX are…

  • 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…

  • 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:  •…

  • MacBook Pro Defects

    On Monday, my MacBook Pro arrived. Fantastic piece of equipment, but that isn’t what this post is about. It didn’t take me long to notice some out of box issues that really made me mad. When one pays as much as they did for a laptop, they want it to be perfect, and with Apple’s…