Certs get me more money!

                          

ITIL is valuable in my career, but I think I’m going to need to read into it more. I managed 70% on the course, but if you don’t know what ITIL is, then here is an extract from Wikipedia.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for managing Information Technology (IT) services (ITSM), IT development and IT operations.

ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

                          

I already racked my brains for a week trying to work out what was wrong, fiddling with permissions, rebooting several times and still nothing. Well stop worrying about the sharing and permissions on your folders, because there’s nothing wrong with them.

I’ll assume that you’re running Windows 7, or possibly Vista. If you’re on XP it’s time to upgrade yourself to Windows 7, why? Because it will rock your damn socks off. But enough of that, I’ll also assume that you’re sharing your videos and music to your XBOX 360 through Windows Media Player.

What’s wrong is that the Windows Media Library has gone corrupt, generally this will happen on Vista and Windows 7, and here is how to fix it.

Go to task manager and stop the processes:

- wmplayer.exe
- wmpnscfg.exe
- WMPnetwk.exe

Close Internet Explorer and Windows Media Center, any software that has a Winodws Media Player plugin, and Windows Media Player 12 if you’ve got it open.

Browse too – C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft

Rename the “Media Player” folder to “Media Player.old”.

Start Media Player 12 and a default library is made. Add media files again and it will index the files again and show on the xbox 360.

                          

from the LightsOut Website.

LightsOut – The name says it all.

This Add-In is used to put a Windows Home Server into suspended mode or hibernation and resume on user defined events.

Description

To go to sleep, you can choose from several methods:

- On demand, when no more clients are active
- Based on a calendar, as a single action or repeated each weekday
- Or as a combination of both methods
You can define times, where the server has to be up and running:

- Using the calendar
- Based on the defined backup time
Wake up

A suspended or hibernated server can be resumed using a calendar event.
You can also install a small application on your client machines to wake up your server when needed.

Additional functionality

The Add-In visualizes the uptime of your client machines, your server and the backup time. So you can easily identify the
machine which puts the server into sleep.

Data integrity

To reduce the risk of data loss, the server is never put into sleep during an active backup operation or a backup cleanup.
You can define services, which are stopped on suspend and restarted after resume. The DriveExtenderMigrator always belongs to this list of services. Additional services like a mail server can be added.

Download from LightsOut: http://www.axonet.de/whs/LightsOutInstaller0.8.2.235.msi

Update: This only works on Windows Home Server, it does not work on a desktop operating system, XP, Vista or Windows 7.