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Showing posts from May, 2014

misc: power savings problem with snagit 12

I have been a fan of snagit for very long time now. when I saw snagit 12 was released, I had to get my hands on it! as a mvp , one of the many benefits you get is nfr (not for resale) licenses for a lot of different software by a lot of vendors. I won’t pretend there was some immediate correlation I drew to the problem I started having after installing snagit. it wasn’t something immediate or evident. my monitors will go into low power mode after 10 minutes of inactivity. I noticed after coming back to my desk several times that it wasn’t happening anymore. I checked all my power settings to make sure nothing changed. everything looked fine. I recalled at some point that powercfg was a utility I had seen and played with some while back that could be useful in narrowing down where the issue might be.   LOOKING FOR THE CULPRIT the first thing I did (other than figuring out how to use the tool) was run an energy report. powercfg /energy /output "energy.html"   with

atlanta techstravaganza 06.06.2014

did you save the date? well, it’s not too late! what is atlanta techstravaganza you ask? it’s a yearly group meeting where atlanta systems management user group , the atlanta powershell user group, and the atlanta windows infrastructure and virtualization user group come together for a gigantic event. we have three tracks running concurrently providing information from topics on system center, powershell, and windows server. along with that, we have a BYOD hands-on lab. along with great content, networking opportunities, and free food, we always end the event with some great giveaways. we’ve moved locations this year from the microsoft alpharetta campus to the georgia tech research institute. while we love and appreciate what microsoft does for us, their campus size was unfortunately limited to 100 people. at GTRI, we have doubled the capacity! having twice the space doesn’t mean you should wait. seats will go fast, and as in previous years, we are likely to completely sell out. co

managing local admin passwords

one of the missing features that gives some windows administrators (and ALL security administrators) heartburn on the windows desktop platform is the lack of built-in controls to manage local passwords. group policy preferences was one of the ways you could get around this problem, but as you probably already know, it was quite insecure and recently addressed by a security update. okay, so where does that leave us? recently, tom ausburne wrote this bang up article which goes into quite a few things, like the insecurity of group policy preferences, the jiri method, and pass the hash. it’s definitely worth the read and provides all the steps necessary to set up the jiri method in your environment. so what’s this jiri method? it basically changes the local admin password to something random and stores the value in AD. the disclaimer is that the password is stored unencrypted in clear text. tom’s article goes a bit into protecting the attribute (a concept called confidential bit.)   h