Last night I was catching up on some of the blogs which I often read, and I came across a REALLY USEFUL little tool, which I found on the blog of my good friend Robert Pearman of Title Required who is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.  Whenever I need any technical answers Rob’s blog is one of the first places I visit.

So while I was on the site,  I found a really good tool to easily find the asset tag of a DELL machine, (or indeed any other) without having to look on the sticker.   In order to do this, you will need to open a command prompt and issue the following command.

wmic csproduct get vendor,name,identifyingnumber

I tried this and it works very well, so a huge thanks goes to Rob.. If you want to find out more about this, then visit Robs Blog over at http://titlerequired.com/2011/10/28/quick-fix-find-a-dell-service-tag-umm-quickly/

Chris Timm is the Managing Director of TCG Computer Services, an awesomely cool company providing IT Services in Basingstoke, and IT Services in Hampshire to small and medium businesses. Chris is also a Microsoft SBSC Partner Area Lead. Why not visit our company blogs to find out more about our IT solutions and services to small companies in Basingstoke and Hampshire

In the last couple of weeks, we have  installed a couple  server(s) for various clients.   Both servers were installed with Microsoft SBS 2008 and for some reason, apparently random,  the servers seemed  to loose connection, to the Internet.  It would appear that certain websites worked and others did not. It appeared as if the server was just rebooting itself and not starting up correctly.

Anyway after some research and talking to some of my SBSC colleagues, I found a solution to the problem. !!!
It would appear that when you set up SBS 2008 one of the defaults it takes is root hints, and seems to set the wrong DNS setting (well at least for UK TLD’s)

So it seems that the solution to this is to set up DNS forward look-ups instead of using root hints.  There is a very simple way to do this, using OpenDNS..   See the post below.

http://www.channelprosmb.com/blog/entry/2894/How-to-flip-your-SBS-2008-to-forwarders/

So far this seems to have worked well for me.

On Thursday night I attended the monthly Thames Valley SBSC group, which is held at the Symantec Offices in Reading. On Thursday , we had the privilege of hearing James Baker from Symantec talk about the SEP (Symantec EndPoint Protection) products.

Of course I have always been very sceptical about some of the AntiVirus offerings coming from Symantec, especially the “Norton” product range. The first thing I do when I see Norton Internet Security is do “Add/Remove” as I constantly have issues with it, usually I install something else, like AVG.

However I listened with intent about what the product could do and spoke to some of the other members, during the Pizza Break, about their experiences with the product. Most of the comments were that its a pretty good product. Of the 3 or 4 people I spoke to all the comments were very positive.

I have been looking into changing the AntiVirus products I supply and install for my customers, which is currently a mixture of AVG and Trend. This talk by Symantec could not have come at a better time,.

I have now signed up to the Symantec Partner program, whereby you can download a trial copy of SEP. I have installed this on one of my test servers in the lab, and I must say, I am very impressed with the product.

Along with all the other Symatec products, offered by us to our customers, such as BackupExec. I think we will soon have our clients “SYMATECISED“

For more information on their partner program, visit http://www.symantec.com/partners/

Dave Sobel, the king of Virtualization in the SMB space is coming to the Uk (well actually only England) to do a tour of the user groups and talk about Virtualization. If you want to come and see him, you would be more than welcome..

As far as I know the dates are:

Monday 12th January 2009 – London SBS User Group – Contact Ian Watkins for more information on dates and times

Tuesday 13th January 2009 – Thames Valley SBS User Group – Contact Mike Bryett for more information

Wednesday 14th January 2009 – Thames Valley SBS User Group – Contact Richard Tubb for more information

If you would like to see a video that Dave did in Chicago on Virtualization, which I attended, you can get the DVD here http://www.smbbooks.com/products/dvd_virtualization.htm