• How To

    Web Site Tools

    February 22, 2017 /

    I thought I’d just put up a quick page to list the tools I use to create, maintain and optimise my websites. Hosting and Domain Names I currently use Heart Internet and Go Daddy for domain names and HostMedia to host my websites. Heart Internet, start at £2.49* per month for web hosting and £6.99* per year for a co.uk domain name. HostMedia has hosting for £1* for 100Mb space for life and £7.19* a year for a .co.uk domain name. This means you can get your own domain and website very cheaply. Website and Plugins The main tool I use is to create websites is WordPress. It’s very easy to get started and have a good looking…

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  • How To,  IT,  Support

    Draytek Router Firmware Damage – the router will die after reboot

    February 1, 2017 /

    Draytek Router Firmware Damage If you have a DrayTek with Firmware Damage and a warning “the router will die after reboot” read on to learn how to resolve it. I have been flashing some DrayTek routers after I received an advisory from DrayTek about new critical firmware updates. The first few went as expected with minimal downtime until one, a DrayTek 2830, disconnected midway through the upload of the firmware. The web page of the router came back with an error “session disconnect”.

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  • Hyper-V,  SBS,  Windows Backup

    MMC cannot open the file

    May 27, 2016 /

    MMC cannot open the file Today I had a problem with a server running Windows 2008 R2 and HyperV. We were unable to get into the HyperV manager and had  an error “MMC cannot open the file C:\Windows\system32\virtmgmt.msc”. In order to resolve this, I simply renamed the file virtmgmt to virtmgmt.old in the folder :

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  • IT,  SBS,  Support

    Event ID 1500 1501 application event log spwebapp

    April 26, 2016 /

    I have just been looking at a problem with IIS (OWA outlook web access and sharepoint http://companyweb were not responding) and remote access to the RDS server had stopped. The application event log was full of event ID 1500 and 1501 for the user spwebapp. The Windows SBS 2011 is running Exchange/OWA and IIS and has the remote gateway configured to redirect to the RDS server. I restarted the remote gateway service which fixed the remote access problem. The next problem was OWA and Company web not responding. I restarted IIS by running the IISreset from an admin command prompt but this didn’t change anything. As you can see the event were happening frequently…

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  • General IT,  Support,  Windows Backup

    Windows 2012 Backup error 0x8004231F

    April 8, 2016 /

    I recently had a server that had Windows Backup failing with the error (0x8004231F) “There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy on the storage location” All the hard drives appeared to have plenty of space and the backup drives were new and also had plenty of space. I deceided to try and run the backup from the command line and while this also errored it gave a bit more detail Error code 0x8004231f

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  • General IT,  PCI Compliance

    PCI Compliance failure due to Clickjacking threat

    April 7, 2016 /

    Recently I’ve come across a new PCI compliance failure “Web Application Potentially Vulnerable to Clickjacking”. What is Clickjacking ? Clickjacking uses IFrames to basically put a tranparent layer over a website and therefore can hijack the clicks and keystrokes the user enters.  This is also known as a “UI redress attack” as it is changing the Users Interface. This means users can be fooled into giving up usernames and passwords when they think they are logging into legitimate web sites, not realising there is a layer intercepting these details between them and the legitimate site.

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  • General IT,  PCI Compliance

    Security Metrics PCI Compliance Site Failed

    March 4, 2016 /

    One of the companys I work with take Credit Card payments and therefore want to be PCI compliant, and use security metrics to scan the network for compliance. Lately they’ve been failing their online scan for a few reasons. Windows 2003 has been detected and that is now unsupported. TLS version 1.0 is still enabled SSL RC4 is still enabled. Security Metrics PCI Compliance Site Certification Failed…

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  • General IT,  Hyper-V,  IT,  Support

    Windows 2008 server Hyper-V host and corrupted windows install

    February 21, 2016 /

    I had a bit of a worrying time last week when a colleague upgraded an old (but live) Dell PowerEdge R310 server running Hyper-V with some new RAM. He powered down the old server, upgraded the RAM and booted the server back up. A few minutes later he was looking at the screen loading windows, when it failed. He put the DVD and tried to repair windows but when he got to the  System recovery window it didn’t show any installations of Windows. He then looked to restore from backup to another server to get the Hyper-V clients running while we fix this server. Yes, you know what’ coming here, the latest backup we had…

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