IT Knowledgebase Articles

Disabling first run welcome screen in IE8 & IE9 via Group Policy Editor or Registry Editor. Daniel Petri provides a walkthrough for disabling the “Welcome to Internet Explorer” page that continues to appear if you reset the IE settings or log in as a different user.

Bruce Mackenzie-Low covers SAN based Windows clusters, the improvments in failover clustering with Windows 2008 R2, and the requirements to consider when configuring disk drives to be used in a SAN-based Windows cluster.

Sean Wilkins discusses QoS Classification and Marking configuration in relation to VoIP Quality of Service implementation on Cisco equipment. This marking is used by devices on the network to prioritize high priority over low priority marked traffic. Also covered are Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) values, Per Hob Behaviors (PHB) and Modular QoS Command Line Interface (MQC).

Daniel Petri explains how to block Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) automatic updates with the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit. Unlike the IE9 blocking tool, this tool does have an expiration date – the 22nd of February 2012.

Explanation by Bruce Mackenzie-Low of Windows disk storage architecture for troubleshooting disk storage issues. Includes detailed overview of the I/O request, storage drivers and the Windows storage stack.

Expanding upon VoIP Quality of Service (QoS) basics, Sean Wilkins discusses congestion management techniques and queue configuration. Includes popular queueing mechanisms like FIFO (First-In First-Out), WFQ (Weighted Fair Queueing), Priority and Custom Queueing to reduce the effect that network congestion has on the flow of traffic across the network.

This RAID levels comparison article provides an overview of RAID storage levels. Veronica Henry provides an explanation of the most common RAID levels, including requirements and benefits of each level.

Explanation of RemoteFX by Daniel Petri. Now, with Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1, RemoteFX introduces a set of end-user experience enhancements for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that enable a rich desktop environment within the corporate network. Article includes hardware and software requirements, functionality overview, and a rundown of required editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1.

Explanation of VoIP dial peer configuration options by Sean Wilkins, including different ways to utilize the dial peer functionality that is built into Cisco IOS.

How-to by Bruce Mackenzie-Low on using PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) reports for highlighting which counters have exceeded predetermined thresholds. The lastest versions of PAL 2.0, now using PowerShell instead of VBScript, can simplify the troubleshooting of performance issues by identifying when counters have exceeded various thresholds, graphing their trends and identifying bottlenecks.