Category: PowerShell
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Which Patches?
It came up in conversation with a friend recently that he believed that a Windows Update (hotfix, patch, whatever you want to call it) broke something on his computer. What can I say? It happens… sometimes. No problem Fred, all you have to do is roll back the updates that were applied last week and…
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PowerShell: A Colourful Experience
One of the topics I inject into every one of my classes (and frankly, most of my customer conversations) is how to do whatever we are doing in PowerShell. Scripting is one of the ways I make my life easier, and I recommend my students and customers use the knowledge I share to make their…
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IPv6: Be gone!
Let me start this piece by stating that I am not advocating that we all ignore IPv6. There are many reasons to use it, and there is nothing wrong with it. Sure, it is more complicated than we may like… but then again, so was IPv4 when we were first introduced to it. But alas,…
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A PowerShell Gotcha
I was bulk-creating users for a test environment today, and in doing so, I borrowed a script from an article online, which set the password for all users to ‘Pa$$word’ I usually use a variation on the same for test environments, but I opted to leave this one as it was. The script worked. A…
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Deleting User Profiles
“How do I delete old users from a Windows 10 computer? I log in as an administrator, navigate to c:\Users\, and delete their tree.” NO! In fact, HELL NO! There are several reasons why you might want to delete a user profile from a computer. ranging from termination of employment to reallocation of systems to……
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Default Gateway Corrections
The default gateway setting in Windows (and every other networked operating system) is a simple setting that tells your network interface card (NIC) where to send traffic when sending it outside of your domain segment. More often than not, it will be the .1 address of a network segment (e.g.: 10.0.0.1), but that is not…
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SCOM Prerequisites: A Web of Confusion
Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) has several prerequisites that must be installed for each component, and frankly, some of those can be cumbersome to get around. Of course, it is nice for the SCOM installation console to let us know that Report Viewer (a free download from Microsoft, link provided in the notifications window)…
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SCOM Management Packs: Removing Foreign Languages
When you go to add Management Packs (MPs) to System Center Operations Manager, there is that temptation to be lazy and just add everything. This will clog your environment with a lot of things you do not need… including MPs in languages that you likely do not speak, read, or care about (within the context…
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Operations Manager: How to List What Management Packs Are Installed?
A client asked me recently how to determine what Management Packs he had installed in his System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) infrastructure. I told him to open his Management Console and navigate to Administration – Installed Management Packs. It was a short conversation. Easy peasy, right? Here’s a list, go with G-d. Twenty minutes later, my phone…
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SCOM License – Upgrade?
The installation of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2016 does not ask you anywhere to enter a license key. Then when you run the Operations Console, you are shown a required task to Upgrade to full version. When you click on the link, it opens a website that is less than helpful. In fact, when you…
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Active Directory Recycle Bin
A few years ago, Microsoft introduced the Active Directory Recycle Bin to Windows Server. Wonderful! It is not enabled out of the box, but it is reasonably simple to enable… except, it is not. Firstly, you can do it in the GUI… Open the Active Directory Administrative Center, navigate to local (local), and then in the…
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DCPromo No More… PowerShell!
I needed to build a new domain controller for a friend’s company recently. It is something that I have done so many times over the past two decades that some things are just instinctive… like typing dcpromo to create a domain controller. Right… I had forgotten about that. dcpromo has been deprecated. You could go…
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Renaming Files en Mass…
I take a lot of pictures… not only with my phone, but also with my Nikon DSLR camera. It is one of my hobbies… I am not very good at it, but I enjoy it nonetheless. Keeping track of hundreds or thousands of pictures is easy, as long as you copy them into the appropriate…
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Scheduling Server Restarts
If you manage servers you have likely come to a point where you finished doing work and got a prompt ‘Your server needs to reboot. Reboot now?’ Well you can’t reboot now… not during business hours. I guess you’ll have to come back tonight… or this weekend, right? Wrong. Scheduling a reboot is actually pretty…
The World According to Mitch 