The IT Crownd

First off, I must appologise, this Power shell script is not my own.  Worst, I cannot remember where I got the script from.  I will endeavour to credit the author as soon as I find them. With that in mind...Some time ago I needed to find out what the DNS settings on our servers were, and as they are manually configured i.e. no DHCP this would mean jumping on each box (200+) and taking a peak.  This screamed Power Shell at me! This little script will run off and return to you the IP configuration of any server you can access.  It does a nice little check to see if the server is on first before trying to get the IP information. I added the write out to a file bit but the original just had the output sent to the console. Here's the code. [cmdletbinding()] param (     [parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]     [string[]]$ComputerName = $env:computername )           ...

We've been having some fun with printer drivers on our XenApp 6.5 farm recently. We were able to track this down to some 3rd party drivers (I know, I know!) I used the cool Citrix tool PrintDective from here  http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116474   to show me all the 3rd party (non-native) drivers we had installed on the server. Once I had found the 3rd party drivers I had a devil of a time removing them.  They were always in use - even if I was the only user on the server!  It was as if the drivers would not remove! I used the following procedure from  https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/b6c03300-fbed-4604-85fe-edbb811d769e/failed-to-remove-printer-driver  to remove the drivers and packages.  And now all is well in my Citrix farm.  Xen. :) 1. Then we stopped print spooler 2. In registry we opened HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Print Processors\ 3. We renam...

I was unhappy with the automatic notifications given out by Veeam so I made my own. I used the Exchange Health Check Power Shell as a guide and here's mine. Basically this Power Shell runs through the Veeam sessions in the last 24hours and reports on the statuses of each vm within that session, I pull out the time for each vm to backup (Duration) and the amount of Restore Points each VM has. One thing to note is that if you rename a job in Veeam this does not change the name of the session.  I had to add some code to work around a renamed job as I was getting no information for the Restore Points.  I left this out of the posting as this was particular to my environment and may not be in yours. Here's a mock up of what you can expect to see... Here the Veeam job, Contoso Infra has eight VMs and the job, Contoso Services has 3. Veeam 24hr Backup Report - 2014/10/27 Contoso Infra Server Name Status Duration ...

Well keeping up with the times (sort of) I thought I'd blitz my CentOS 6 vm and build a new one.  Also this gives me an opportunity to test out my last post and re-install everything AGAIN. Fun. Well it started out fun. :) It seems things have changed ALOT since CentOS 6 New firewall for starters.  Gone is "service start smb".  Gone is chkconfig! What! Oh well new day new tricks.  It looks like chckconfig and service are now combined into one command systemctl - ok this makes good sense.  I like it. For example to enable Apache to persist between boots systemctl enable httpd and to stop Apache systemctl stop httpd simple. I like the new firewall too. fairewall-cmd to control it.  Nice.  To me at least this is much more intuitive to use with the zones and such than using iptables directly. Learning learning learning!!!

I've been looking into providing a good proxy server to replace the old stalwart Threat Management Gateway which is now out of support and development from Microsoft. Having recently passed my Redhat exam I thought I would look for something a bit LINUX based to run the proxy.  This led me to find SQUID. http://www. squid -cache.org There is plenty of documentation around how to set up the proxy.   Typically with LINUX, the documentation is written assuming that the reader knows what is going on  and is not a beginner. I got the basic proxy up and running pretty quickly.  I even had WPAD working correctly!   The defaults all worked! However the sticking point was how to get Squid to use an Active Directory group to determine who has  access to the Internet. Here's how I implemented the whole thing.  From start to finish.  As much as I can remember.   Obviously I'll omit the days of effort pursuing failures and just present...

Ok.  So here's the rub.  I didn't know this till this morning. You can put nslookup into debug mode! This means you can find where those pesky "Non-Authoritive answers" came from! Awesome. Here's how: C:\>nslookup -d2 bingo.

I've been getting MDT working here and one of the annoyances is the corporate "required" legal notice pop up. This breaks MDT.  The build process requires the local admin to log in and out a few times. There are a few work-arounds which I came up with however none are as simple and cool as the one suggested by Alex's blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alex_semi/archive/2009/08/28/avoiding-legan-notice-that-breaks-mdt-autologon.aspx Basically the idea is:  Delay the domain join until the last minute.  This avoids ever applying the GPO which forces the legal notice. Excellent.