IT’s Balto

For those unfamiliar with it Milestone XProtect is one of the most widely used video management software (VMS) on large scale environment. Quoting from the company’s website: The XProtect VMS products are video management software designed for installations of all shapes and sizes. Whether you want to protect your store from vandalism or you want to manage a multi-site, high security installation, XProtect makes it possible. The solutions offer centralized management of all devices, servers, and users, and provide an extremely flexible rule system driven by schedules and events....

In enterprise environments for many years we have managed user data through solutions such as Folder Redirection and Roaming Profiles. These methods, when properly implemented, have proven to be very effective, allowing users to access their data from any computer in the corporate network. In some cases, these solutions have even been a compelling choice, both to promote mobility and to facilitate more streamlined and centralized backup management. However, with the rise of cloud computing and the almost universal adoption of Microsoft 365, we now have an additional and in some cases preferable option available: OneDrive Known Folder Move (KFM)....

As we saw in a previous article, Wake on LAN is a network protocol that allows a computer to be remotely booted by sending a special packet called Magic Packet. Trying to be vaguely technical, it is important to remember that this protocol operates on layer 2 of the OSI model. In other words, Wake on LAN packets are transmitted as Broadcast UDP and are therefore limited to the local network in which they are generated....

Nearly a year has passed since the preview launch of the New Microsoft Teams and, although not exactly all the features seem to be perfectly stable, Microsoft decided long ago to automatically deploy this new version in place of the dear, old, established Teams Classic. Now, in principle, I see this automatic update as absolutely welcome, according to Microsoft’s own words: Users who have installed a different version of Teams will have their version replaced with the version being provisioned....

Remote, remote, remote! In the management of our machine fleet at the very first places of the must-haves we surely find the configuration of remote access no? We have options such as RDP, SSH, and WinRM. However, we may encounter an issue if the machine is turned off. You have a choice between calling someone on site to turn it on, going to the site yourself, doing everything yourself from your desk with WOL....

In a bureaucracy that, albeit slowly, is increasingly pushing digital and dematerialization, digital signatures have been in daily use for some years now. Their best-known incarnation takes the form of files with the extension p7m: a digital container for one or more signed documents. In fact given their widespread use recently I needed to make a utility available for opening and verifying p7m files to all users in a company. How to do this?...

Several times in our articles we’ve emphasized the significance of monitoring our infrastructure closely. This certainly applies to simple UPSs as well, in fact in the previous article we talked about how we can monitor an APC UPS even without SNMP thanks to APC-ScrapConnect. The article ended with a cliffhanger by revealing that APC-ScrapConnect was designed to integrate with Zabbix more easily through a specific discovery function. Shall we explore this further?...

This story begins more or less like this with an innocent phone call (ed: names were changed because I wanted an excuse to write that the names were changed, how cool is it?): > Hi Angelo, I need a UPS with a network card, a 1500VA is fine, what do you propose? < Um let me think, APC as usual I guess, by when do you need it? > Yesterday! [....

Cybersecurity has become a top priority in the digital age in which we live. Organizations in every industry face increasingly sophisticated threats to protect their data and systems from malicious attacks. In addition, the increasingly rapid evolution of technologies, as well as new capabilities and paradigms, requires an equally continuous evolution of our security policies. Just think of how the IT landscape has changed in the last few years: Azure, AWS, Containers, and SaaS solutions have joined or replaced classic Windows Server-centric infrastructures, and there is no shortage of developments on this front as well....

February 14, 2023 is in its own way a historic date, after the end of support on June 15, 2022, Microsoft has officially disabled Internet Explorer in Windows and it is no longer possible to open it as a stand-alone program, in its place will in fact start Microsoft Edge. I say historic because IE has accompanied us, for better or worse, for almost three decades and even with all its problems, it cannot be denied that it was the one that brought everyone to the web, the first step into the digital age that opened a world to us through its iconic blue “e”....