Server Changes
So I hopped services again, and it’s taken me a bit to get things up and running the way I want them to. The big difference now, I’m hosting my own services, so there was a learning curve for me …...
View ArticlePowerShell forensic use
This is just a collection of links, most from the scripting guy about how to use PowerShell in forensic analysis of a computer system. I culled some of these together for the security group I belong to...
View ArticleWindows Server 2012 Single Node Cluster
So this posting is a re-hash of a post that I did over a year ago when Windows 2012 was still Windows Server 8. PS C:Windowssystem32> Add-WindowsFeature Failover-ClusteringSuccess Restart Needed...
View ArticleWeek In Review : 07/27/2014
Another week coding the app, the nice thing is that the MVC re-write is pretty much done. In fact the idea of utilizing the DB to store information is actually in place, something I wound up having to...
View ArticleBulk URL Monitoring
How did I not know about this before? So I’m working on creating a Management Pack for Advanced Group Policy Management, and hunting for the utility to seal a MP. I find this utility buried in the...
View ArticleDISM…’because reasons’
I don’t know why this is a thing, it shouldn’t be a thing. I’m going to post a link to the page on TechNet, and then just paste in the content. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn482069.aspx...
View ArticleDSC + WinRM + GPO
Ok, so I’m working on Desired State Configuration at work, and I had created a GPO to manage the WinRM settings a long while ago. This allows me to control how WinRM works and so forth and was needed...
View ArticleAutomating Linux in Azure
Automation is one of my major areas of work, and most of my automation revolves around System Center Orchestrator. I also do a fair amount of work in Azure and thought it was time to dust off my...
View ArticleHOWTO: Setup IIS 7.5 to use IPv6
I took the SANS 546 class today, and it got me thinking about setting up my server to respond to IPv6 hosts. Steps thus far are pretty straightforward: Get an account with a tunnel broker Configure...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Supporting ancient hardware
Today we’ll be working on some moldy oldies! I give you the SGI Indigo, and it’s successor the SGI Octane! Bow in front of their immense glory! Here is the problem: We have research analysis software...
View ArticleSCCM + Dell – ServiceTag = HEADACHE
Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything and this will most likely be the last post before I hop platforms, but since the resolution took nearly my whole morning I felt it was worthy a...
View ArticleNew Home
It’s been forever since I’ve posted anything, a lot has gone on in my work and family life. I don’t have the time I used to have to tinker around with hosting my own stuff. I had thought about moving...
View ArticleRepository and Blog
I migrated over all my scripts late last night, it only took about an hour. I think part of the problem was on my end, I had to basically restart the sync several times to get everything over. The...
View ArticleDefrag is not defragging
I posted a question in the forums the other day after attempting to defrag one of the drives on my file server. The drive in question is where we have all the application installation files for the...
View ArticleLibrary updates
I have updated all my PowerShell libraries to be uniformly formatted and corrected any missing information. The wiki pages for each have also been updated. Tomorrow I plan on cleaning up the blog and...
View ArticleRDP over SSH
Before I start, while this will allow you to access your servers over a secure tunnel, this does not mean you should forego patching your systems. Don’t be that kind of admin, install the patches,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows Server 8 Beta Failover Clustering Part 1
I read a very nice article over on TechNet about some of the new features of Failover Clustering in Windows 8, so I decided to give it a spin. It’s not too bad, I’m really enjoying the new Server...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows Server 8 Beta Failover Clustering Part 2
There were so many images that I decided to split this up over several posts. In Part 1, I got the Failover Cluster feature installed on my first server, and now I’m going to work through the Failover...
View ArticleWindows Server 8 Beta Failover Clustering and PowerShell
So the last two posts (one, two) were just some screenshots and comments as I went through and created a failover cluster. To be fair this wasn’t the first go round with the cluster I created one...
View ArticlePowerShell New-AdInventory script
I may have mentioned on here before that we rely quite heavily on Active Directory, and it’s true. It’s at the core of nearly all the services we deliver, the only exception would be the web, and that...
View ArticleExitCodes Part 2
So, yesterday I mentioned that I re-wrote the inventory script. Today I decided to re-write the reboot script. The idea behind the script is that once a week we bounce all the lab computers. We do this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows EventLog Management–Part 1
Using Event Triggers and Event Forwarding to get what you want from the Event Subsystem Event logs are horrible, and depending on which log you’re looking at they could be even more horrible! Seriously...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows EventLog Management–Part2
How to get the log to let you know when something happened Event Triggers Specify a custom action when a particular event occurs Start a program Send an email Display a message Use scripting to give...
View ArticleWeekly DPM Monitoring
Part of my responsibility is handling storage. This includes allocating, deallocating, backing up and restoring. Now we’ve been using DPM for quite some time and are currently running on DPM 2010....
View ArticleClik here to view.
DPM Sizing Script
Yesterday I told you how I had decided to automate a portion of my DPM routine. As usual this got the fires burning and a second script was born. I would have told you about it yesterday but I wanted...
View ArticleUpdated New-PrintJob script
The information I’m going to cover here was previously covered on TechNet. I’m posting this because this morning I came across an error in my PrintLogger script.To be fair it was an error in the...
View ArticleHA/FDM fails to restart a virtual machine with the error: Failed to open file...
This came across my newsfeed last night and this morning, and before I lose the links I thought I’d post them up here. VMware KB article Description of the Problem Perl script to detect and resolve...
View ArticleClik here to view.
RedHat 6 Enterprise + VMware VSphere 4.0
Odd thing happened today while I was setting up a server for someone. The RHEL 6 install went just fine, it found the network card, asked if I wanted to configure it via DHCP and all that. When the...
View ArticleGet recent events from servers
I’ve been working with Microsoft on an issue that I am having with my DPM server. We have been doing some fairly intense logging, and today I enable several performance counters in an attempt to...
View ArticleExporting Event logs in the normal Event Log format
I’ve decided that I’d like to be able to export my event logs in their native .evtx file format. This appears to be faster than converting them all to .csv files. Early on I ran into a few problems,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VMware Update Manager not responding
I received a lovely notice this morning as I was working through my servers and performing updates. I decided I would check my ESXi servers for updates using the VMware Update Manager plugin. This...
View ArticlePrinting from a Scheduled Task as a different user
It does sound a bit odd, but I’m in the process of moving all the regular monitoring I do to scheduled tasks, and this particular one caused me headaches all afternoon. I have a script that I run that...
View ArticleManaging Hotfixes Centrally
Historically I’ve not paid much attention to hotfixes or patches, but lately I’ve decided that I need to change that aspect of my management. I used to create a folder on the server that had the...
View ArticleDPM 2010 console crashes when pushing an agent Install
This is a new one for me, I’ve been running DPM for quite a while now and I’ve not seen this behavior. In a recent staff meeting it came up that the DPM server was having some RPC issues, so since I’m...
View ArticleSCOM 2007 R2 and Get-Event
For whatever reason I’ve not been able to find what I’ve been looking for regarding this cmdlet. Namely a decent example of it’s use with regards to the –Criteria parameter. For better or worse I have...
View ArticleOperations Manager, Orchestrator and PowerShell Remoting
It’s been a very long time since I last posted, the primary reason is most likely laziness on my part and secondly I’ve not had a lot to write about. Recently I’ve been messing around with Orchestrator...
View ArticleHyper-V Server 2012 Cluster with Powershell Deployment Toolkit
I recently came across a lovely show on Channel 9. It talks about setting up a simple Hyper-V Server 2012 cluster for use in a lab or test environment or whatever. I won’t go over the details, watch...
View ArticleSetspn.exe wrapper
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I thought I would post about setspn, because you know, it’s so awesome right? So one of the projects I’ve been working on lately is the upgrade to SCCM...
View ArticleDSC Part 1
Desired State Configuration is a new feature of PowerShell 4.0 that is included out of the box with Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. This feature can be loaded on down-level clients by...
View ArticleDSC Part 2
In my previous article I talked about Desired State Configuration in a more or less generic way. I provided a sample Configuration that installed the basic services needed for a web server. This...
View ArticleDSC Part 3
It’s been a busy day, I haven’t posted anything since July and today three posts! Well in Part 1 we talked about what Desired State Configuration was, in Part 2 I showed you how to manually setup the...
View ArticleShowing off some DSC Resources
Yesterday I wrote three articles ( Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ) about Desired State Configuration. I thought I would post a slightly more complex Configuration. This configuration performs several actions...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Week In Review : 05/25/2014
Well it’s been forever since I’ve written anything interesting so now is as good a time as any. Recently we were informed we needed to start keeping track of time spent on projects and since this is...
View ArticleSystem Center Orchestrator PowerShell Module
This is one I’ve had on the back burner for a while, so yesterday morning I roughed up the basic framework for a PowerShell module. I have a few Runbooks at work, that it would be super cool to just...
View ArticleWeek In Review : 06/01/2014
Another very productive week! Spent a lot of time on Operations Manager, and getting the Low-Privilege SQL Monitoring to work. There appears to be a problem with how the MP calculates PLE and is using...
View ArticleWeek In Review : 06/08/2014
Still a lot of programming this week, but like I said before I think anymore that is more the norm than not. We did some interesting Active Directory stuff this week. We had a handful of servers get...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Week In Review : 06-15-2014
It’s time for another exciting edition of WIR! This week was filled with updates! Rolled updates to our Domain Controllers and one of them took nearly two hours to come back from a reboot! Normally not...
View ArticleWeek In Review : 06-22-2014
Not a terribly eventful week, I’ve been working on tuning Ops down and clearing out the errors, and lowering the signal to noise ratio. One of the hardest ones has been the domain trust monitor in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Week In Review : 07/20/2014
I had intended these to be weekly, and I got off track, sorry about that. So I missed the week of Jun 29, Jul 6 and Jul 13. I can tell you that the week of the 29th ended on July 5th, and I was pretty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I have an addiction problem
At first I thought I had a drinking problem. As evidence by the picture below, I drink A LOT of coffee! Then as I’m driving in to work I’m listening to NPR. They are talking about the health rankings...
View Article