C4Pinger adds WhatsUp Gold like functionality to your network diagram for about $14,000 less than Whats Up Gold. Since it's free, we call it the Cheap 4th-point-of-contact Pinger or C4Pinger.

Download NetworkFileCardV7 and C4Pinger

Let me guess. Printed out and on your desk in the smallest font visible to man's naked eye is an excel spreadsheet with all the phone numbers of your unit listed. It's likely right next to a $500 Cisco Voice-over IP computer phone. To dial a number, you'll break out the bifocals and painstakingly use your finger to line up to the right number on the spreadsheet and punch it in manually on the phone fatfingering the dial pad 10% of the time. Sound familiar?

Wouldn't it be nice if that $500 computer phone could geterate an easily navigatable directory that was as up to date as the listings in the Call Manager? Well, thats exactly what we had in mind when developing the Dynamic Phone Directory (DPD). 

Network File Card shapes:

• Are Self Labeling
• Change the icon when you change the type of device or server it is
• Change their color when you change their classification
• Collapse to an icon with a movable host name when you don't need to full file card
• Link to external data (excel spreadsheets) to make filling in shape properties even easier!
• NEW with V7!
  • Monitor connectivity with C4Pinger Plugin
  • fixed themes for Visio 2016
  • Added more device and server types

Download NetworkFileCardV7 and C4Pinger

With computers, usually the simplest answers are the hardest to find. For example, for the past several months, my home's domain time has been off by a couple hours. The task of fixing it was put on the back burner because I didn't know the simple answer to it and when I finally got around to trying, I simply couldn't find the answer. 

As with most things in a computer, it came down to a stupid checkbox being checked. 


Problem: A Hyper-V Domain Controller had the wrong time and kept resyncing to the wrong time
 

This is probably not a problem that is going to effect much more than .00001% of anyone in the IT community, but it did affect me and successfully killed about 30 hours of my life in troubleshooting. Lucky me. These are just some quick technotes mainly consisting of workarounds rather than real solutions.

Task: Install ESX 3.5 on a Dell M65, 32 bit laptop.

Problem 1: ESX Image will not install initially due to the following error:

Installation Operation Failed!
(ommited)
Unable to find a supported device to write the VMWare ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 image to.
(The rest ommited)