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News Personal Software

Blocking Internet Advertisements, and more with Pi-hole

The challenge is to mitigate exposure to the advertisements spammed all over the internet with the same approach as fighting against virus and malware threats. I recently upgrade my Pi-hole® to take on not only the task of blocking Internet advertisements, but malware, and adult sites. Here is my list on Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/eV3cUnjy Installing Pi-hole Pi-hole makes it as easy […]

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How-To News Personal Software Technical

VMware Guest Customization Specification, Configure Domain Joining

I recently worked to correct an outstanding support issue of VMware Guest Customization Specification not joining guests to Active Directory Domains. I thought I’d share my setup so it might help others facing similar issues. Log into the vSphere console, navigate to the Home page section From the Home page click the Customization Specification Manager […]

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Personal Software Technical

VMware, Windows 10 Customization Specification Not Completing

Here are details of my setup – in fact, I started over from scratch to document my steps. This seems to be a new problem occurring with Windows 10, version 1709   Install of new VMware guest for the purpose of being a template Create new VM, named it windows_10_enterprise_version_1703 Remove floppy drive Uncheck networking […]

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How-To Software Technical

Hyper-V, and Automatic Virtual Machine Activation in Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2012 R2 introduced a feature called “Automatic Virtual Machine Activation” (AVMA), and now in Windows Server 2016, this feature has been carried forward. This feature was primarily designed for Web Hosters but found usefulness in internal Hyper-V server for testing lab machines. What is Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA)? Automatic Virtual Machine Activation is […]

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Personal Software

There is no Internet connection, and what my son taught me

This weekend we had a few internet connection issues at home.  As the in-house IT guy, I had a natural obligation to fix the issue right away. After all, my wife, son and his two sisters needed their connections restored. I worked to diagnose the issue and later resolve it. It was about 30 minutes […]

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How-To Software Technical

Windows Server 2016 Core: Active Directory Domain Services

To lower my memory footprint in my home lab I decided to move from into Windows Server 2016 Core.  That said running Active Directory Domain Service seems to be the perfect candidate to start with my new architectured lab environment. There are several prerequisites required for enabling ADDS, but I am not going to get into […]