Talk About IT!

News, stories and tutorials for IT Administrators

Forcing Wi-Fi on
wifi

Forcing Wi-Fi on

Summary: In the K12 Education world, laptops are becoming more and more prevelant, and so is Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, limited users are allowed to forget Wi-Fi networks and turn on Airplane Mode and disable Wi-Fi altogether, ruining the experience for the next user. Technical Details and Assumptions We are assuming there is no MDM solution in place (i.e. Jamf, Intune, etc) We assume you’re running on-prem Active Directory (for the Group Policy portions) We assume you are not using certificate-based authentication (and therefore, not simply deploying Wi-Fi Profiles with GPO) We assume the profile has been loaded somehow already Requirements You have a method of deploying the Wi-Fi key (i.

  • Luke Barone
BitLocker and Active Directory
bitlocker

BitLocker and Active Directory

Summary: We will use Bitlocker to secure device data, requiring a PIN or Password to boot into Windows or read the hard drive. This is aimed to be the definitive guide to getting started and managing BitLocker. Technical Details Bitlocker locks the key for decryption with multiple keys (“Protectors”). This can include TPM, TPM and PIN, Password, a USB key, and even certificates. You can have multiple ways to unlock the decryption key The keys appear transparent to the user, even during recovery The hard drive can be removed and put into another computer.

  • Luke Barone
Set default printer (without creating a printer) with Group Policy
registry

Set default printer (without creating a printer) with Group Policy

I got disappointed after searching high and low on Google for how to use Group Policy in order to set a default printer. Almost every article I read assumed the reader had a print server available, or would deploy a local printer connection right from the Group Policy Management Console. Finally, I found the solution! In the environment that I support, we have “Printer Packages” by the manufacturer. These packages are essentially printer queues with default settings already entered for the Printer Preferences - you know, the items you CAN NOT change easily from a remote location, to many systems?

  • Luke B
Add Network Clients, Protocols and Services via Command Line
admin share

Add Network Clients, Protocols and Services via Command Line

In a previous post, I talked about why I couldn’t access any file shares, or connect remotely to some systems. The issue was caused by services, protocols and clients missing from the network adapters. Now that the issue had been identified, I had two choices: manually touch every machine, using the mouse for most of the work, or automate the process. This post describes the latter.

  • Luke B
dell

Installing Windows 7 on Dell’s new Skylake-based Systems

Recently, I’ve been seeing posts about the new Skylake-based Intel processors that Dell is using in their Precision, Optiplex and Latitude lines of products. It makes the system fast, even without using much power, but it causes an issue if a SysAdmin needs to install Windows 7 from their installation media - most notably, the USB drive is not available, and neither is the hard drive from the Windows 7 WinPE environment.

  • Luke B
backup

Hello world! We’re back

Welcome back to Talk About IT! We had a bit of a mishap, so all the previous content is gone. Backup, backup backup! Luckily, all the customer data has been recovered, with no loss. The server has been reconfigured, with a proper RAID setup, and off-site backups. It is going to make things a lot easier to recover, hopefully! Once the extra computers I’ve ordered have arrived, I’ll work on setting up haproxy and getting some clustering going.

  • Luke B