When Software Attacks!

Fixing a dodgy proximity sensor on my Nokia Lumia 920

I’ve just had a really infuriating half an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the keypad to appear during a call on my Lumia 920. When I took my phone away form my ear the screen stayed black. Pushing the power button made the display switch on and then immediately switch off. Power cycling and even resetting made no difference. A close examination showed that the small round circle next to the speaker slot at the top of the phone display was full of dust.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force

As you’ve probably seen, our Lab Manager/SCVMM 2008 R2 upgrade to SCVMM 2012 SP1 was not the smoothest in the world. The end result was a clean lab manager and SCVMM install, but a raft of virtual machines that had previously been part of environments. In tidying up, Richard and I learned a few things about picking apart VMs that were once part of an environment such that a new environment could be built form the wreckage.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Things to remember when building virtual machines for a lab manager environment

As you will have read on both mine and Richard’s blogs, we have recently upgraded our Lab environment and it wasn’t the smoothest of processes. However, as always it has been a learning experience and this post is all about building VM environments that can be sucked into Lab and turned into a Lab environment that can be pushed out multiple times. Note: This article is all about virtual machines running on Windows Server 2012 that may have been built on Windows 8 and are managed by SCVMM 2012 SP1 and Lab Manager/TFS 2012 CU1.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 5, 2013

User profile service failures caused by Distributed Cache on SharePoint 2013

This is a relatively quick post, largely because I was not able to record the details of the error messages we saw in the farm before we fixed them. On a recent engagement we were investigating problems with a SharePoint 2013 farm that had been installed for our customer by a third party. There were a number of issues that we worked through but I wanted to record this one for the community.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 14, 2013

A Virtual Ice Cream Sandwich: Android 4 x86 in a Hyper-V VM

More and more of our projects include a stipulation from the client that any web sites must work on the tablet devices of senior management. Up until recently that was exclusively iPads, but we are now seeing more Android devices out there. I wanted to find a straightforward way for us to test on such devices, preferably without needing to build up a collection of expensive physical kit. I read with interest Ben Armstrong’s post about running Android 2.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, June 18, 2012