Tec(h)tonic

Insights into building a solid I.T. foundation in the mid-size business world.

Author: Christopher Scott

  • Send SMS messages from the command line

    This is, pretty much, my favorite discovery of 2016 so far: a freely-available API to send SMS text messages. Called TextBelt (http://textbelt.com/), it uses the *nix curl command to send a line of text and a specified phone number. I’ve started to use this with some of my server scripts set up to notify me…

  • Mac OS X: Speed up Terminal.app startup

    Being a sysadmin, I find myself in the terminal pretty frequently. And, since I’m using a Mac, I’m using the included Terminal.app. One thing that constantly annoys me is the fact that, the more you use the app, the more slowly it starts up. Like, there can be a ten second wait after the terminal…

  • Migrating DHCP configuration to a MS Windows Server domain controller

    My current office environment relies on MS Windows Server 2008 R2 system as its primary domain controller (PDC), handling Active Directory-based user management and authentication, DNS and DHCP services. We have a secondary system as backup, which stays in-sync with the AD and DNS services; DHCP is, of course, not activated on the secondary so as…