A List of Windows & AD Administration Books

Active Directory by Joe Richards, Robbie Allen and Alistair G. Lowe-Norris
Active Directory Administration for Windows Server 2012 & Windows Server 2012 R2 (The Personal Trainer) by William Stanek
Active Directory Administration: The Personal Trainer for Windows Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008 R2  by William Stanek
Active Directory Cookbook: Solutions for Administrators & Developers (Cookbooks (O’Reilly)) by Brian Svidergol and Robbie Allen
Active Directory: Designing,

What Type of Speaker Works Wirelessly with a Laptop and Provides a Better Sound Than Twangy Speakers?

Problem scenario
For travel it is nice to have a way to listen to music or spoken word instructions (e.g., technical, job-related audio) without head phones and not rely on twangy, lower-power laptop speakers.  What type of speaker is not too heavy or big, is of a high quality, and will work wirelessly with a laptop?

Solution
The Sharper Image SBT605OR Speaker

A List of Hyper-V Books

Designing Hyper-V Solutions by Saurabh Grover
Hyper-V 2016 Best Practices by Benedict Berger and Romain Serre
Hyper-V Best Practices by Benedict Berger
Hyper-V for VMware Administrators: Migration, Coexistence, and Management by Brien Posey
Hyper-V Network Virtualization Cookbook by Ryan Boud
Hyper-V Replica Essentials by Vangel Krstevski
Hyper-V Security by Eric Siron and Andy Syrewicze
Instant Hyper-V Server Virtualization Starter by Vicente Rodriguez Eguibar
Learning Hyper-V by Vinicius R.

How Do You Install an Older Version of Ansible on an AWS Instance of Red Hat Linux?

Problem scenario
You are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in AWS.  You need to install an older version of Ansible — not the newest.  The pip command and other supported ways of deploying Ansible automatically use the newest version.  You also want to install Maven. 

Solution
Run this script with “sudo”. (You could run it as root, but that is not recommended.)  The server must be in a Security Group with access to the internet.

A List of Azure Books

15 minute Azure Installation: Set up the Microsoft Cloud Server by the Numbers by Barrett Leibe
A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control: Authentication and Authorization for Services and the Web (Microsoft patterns & practices) by Dominick Baier, Vittorio Bertocci, Keith Brown, Scott Densmore, Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski
Automating Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services: From the Data Center to the Cloud with PowerShell by Michael Washam
Automating Microsoft Azure with Powershell by Aman Dhally and John Chapman
Azure in Action by Chris Hay and Brian Prince
Azure Mobile and Cloud Development in C# by Joe Ficara
Building Clouds with Windows Azure Pack by Amit Malik
Building Hybrid Applications in the Cloud on Windows Azure (Microsoft patterns &

How Do You Install Vagrant on an AWS Instance of RedHat Linux?

Problem scenario
You are using a RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) server in AWS.  You want to install Vagrant. What do you do?

Solution
Assume the root user by issuing this command: sudo su –
Run these commands:
yum -y install wget
cd /tmp
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/1.8.1/vagrant_1.8.1_x86_64.rpm 
yum -y localinstall vagrant_1.8.1_x86_64.rpm

To verify the installation, run this command: vagrant version

Alternative Solution
If you do not want to install wget and curl commands will work for retrieving https locations,

A List of VMware Books

Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center by David Marshall, Wade A. Reynolds and Dave McCrory
The Best Damn Server Virtualization Book Period: Including Vmware, Xen, and Microsoft Virtual Server by Rogier Dittner and David Rule Jr.
The Book of VMware: The Complete Guide to VMware Workstation by Brian Ward
Building VMware Software-Defined Data Centers by Valentin Hamburger
Configuring VMware ESX Server 2.5 (Vol 1) by Al Muller and Seburn Wilson
DevOps for VMware Administrators (VMware Press Technology) by Trevor A.

A List of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Books

AWS skills are becoming increasingly important as of November 2020.

2015 AWS Cloud Dictionary & Handbook: Reccomnded for Associate Architect and Solution AWS Certifications. by Tony M’aash
Amazon Cloud Computing With C#/.Net (Amazon Cloud Computing With ‘X’) by Aditya Yadav
Amazon EC2 Container Service The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide by 5STARCooks
Amazon EC2 Linux AMI Quick Setup Guide: Get LAMP (Linux, Apache,

How Do You Install Maven on an AWS Instance of RHEL?

Problem scenario
You are using RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.x or 8.x in AWS.  How do you install Maven?

Solution
Prerequisite
Make sure Java has been installed. See this link if you need assistance.

Procedures
1.  Create a file named maven.sh with this as the content:

version=3.6.2
curl http://ftp.wayne.edu/apache/maven/maven-3/$version/binaries/apache-maven-$version-bin.tar.gz /bin/apache-maven-$version-bin.tar.gz

md=$(md5sum /bin/apache-maven-$version-bin.tar.gz | awk ‘{print $1}’)
if [ $md -ne ’35c39251d2af99b6624d40d801f6ff02′ ]
then
echo “Installation of Maven has failed. …

How Do You Troubleshoot the Java Error “class … is public, should be declared in a file named foobar.java”?

Problem scenario
You copied a Java program from the Internet.  You named the file foobar.java.  You try to compile it (e.g., with “javac foobar.java”), but you get this error:

foobar.java:6: error: class ContInt is public, should be declared in a file named ContInt.java
public class ContInt
       ^
1 error

What do you do?

Solution
Rename foobar.java to be ContInt.java.