To 365 Or Not To 365?

   Today the word “cloud” is everywhere, and is used to describe sites, services, and software that are typically provided over the internet. Although the term is new, the concept definitely isn’t. It’s a marketing gimmick and we’ve heard the same thing before, it’s just in a new package now. Email, web sites, and services […]

Hello world!

  After about a decade of the same static content here on marzpolis.com, I’ve decided to start over fresh. All of the old subdomains are now gone, with my blog from dev.marzopolis.com being moved here to serve as the main site. As time permits I’ll be restoring the old posts here and rebuilding boxchronicles.com.

The New Relic API and Powershell Pt. 2

In a previous post I wrote about using Powershell to work with the New Relic monitoring service API, which gives you the ability to query performance metrics it gathers about your application. Once you have this data, it is easy to do whatever you want with it; store it in a database, send a formatted […]

The New Relic API and Powershell

I’ve used the awesome performance monitoring tool New Relic to gather diagnostics and other stats for applications. I thought it would be a really cool idea to get some of the metrics using the New Relic API, but there wasn’t much information on how to do it with Powershell. This is relatively simple though, and […]

Using ESEUTIL To Copy Large Files

Many Exchange admins are familiar with the venerable Exchange database utility ESEUTIL. I’ve used it many times when working with Exchange databases, and it still exists in Exchange 2010. Recently a DBA coworker and I had a scenario where log shipping for a customer’s site was taking way to long to complete due to a […]

Fixing Weak SSL the Easy Way

 IIS Crypto is a great free tool produced by Nartac Sotware that allows Windows Server/IIS admins to easily enable/disable weak SSL cryptos and ciphers. This is a PCI requirement, and I’ve seen it show up on many scan using tools designed to probe for compliance. It’s usually a tedious process of adding/changing registry keys, right […]

Tech Dominates Top Brands

In a testament to the impact technology has had on our lives and the world we live in, research company Millward Brown released a report on the top 100 brands yesterday, with the top four spots taken by technology companies. Google ranked number one, followed by IBM, Apple, and Microsoft, all literally household names cemented […]

A Girl Called Amanda

Finally, my second piece of the Case of the Backup Lemon. This one is about a piece of open source software that makes a handy little backup utility on the right equipment. As mentioned in Part 1 of this story,  I inherited a decent machine and a horrible backup application at my new job as […]

The Case of the Backup Lemon

We’ve all had it happen. Start a new sysadmin or IT job and you inherit some really horrible decisions made in the past. So was the case with me, a new Security & System Admin for a small marketing company. One of the first things my new boss tasked me with was managing the backup […]

Using DNS Zones To Distinguish Enviroments

Many system and network administrators are responsible for supporting development, QA, and production systems for sites and web based applications. In simplest form the code/app is moved from one to the other as it progresses through the lifecycle. The systems could be located on different networks, are usually housed on different servers, and can even […]