Just another example of peanut butter and pepper on toast.

Hyper-V Replication Sanity Checks

Hyper-V Replication Sanity Checks

These are a few of the sanity checks that we use to confirm that replication is working in Hyper-V. I’ll update this as I find more. Broken Replication List all replica VMs that are in warning state, and if you can find the Primary replica. Often when a replication is broken the admin forgets that […]

Multithreading, and Folder Sizes

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Most of my scripting comes from Purpose. As the Boring Task on the file team, we had a list of DFS shares and wanted to find out how big the folders inside were. Sometimes this was ‘region\user\’, sometimes ‘region\projects\’, but often a huge list. Programs like WinDirStat we great for admins, but programatically hard to […]

MSI Silent Install – SCOM Agent

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Automatically deploying things are great but sometimes applications have quirks. Hopefully, someone else with SCOM Agent issues will find this useful. Works Interactive – Fails Silently, Silently To simplify what we had originally researched as a good installer command, we had this for our interactive install; %WinDir%\System32\msiexec.exe /i \\contonso.com\dfs\install\SCOM\agent\AMD64\MOMAgent.msi  USE_SETTINGS_FROM_AD=0 MANAGEMENT_GROUP=CONTOSO MANAGEMENT_SERVER_DNS=omg1v.contoso.com ACTIONS_USE_COMPUTER_ACCOUNT=1 AcceptEndUserLicenseAgreement=1 This […]

Releasing a ‘Protected’ W...

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Usually I wouldn’t recommend bypassing security, but less so when I have suggested workflow updates to a template whose maintainer had left.

Enforcement via Preference

Enforcement via Preference

Our domain is very open with giving users freedom to work as needed – we don’t have many policies to restrict them. But the policies we do have we enforce where-ever we can. One of the important ones is desktop Antivirus and Configuration management, but I’ve been using this technique to deploy Salt-Minion to servers as well.

Getting around CryptoLocker

Getting around CryptoLocker

One of the most horrifying phonecalls is the confirmation that CryptoLocker is loose on the network. For a small outbreak of a previous swap-and-bate worm, we got around this by the user catching it fast, and using the Windows file server “previous versions” to restore back any files that had vanished. We were lucking in […]

Email Pattern

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I have a standard Email template that I use. I get asked a lot of repetitive questions around users in Active Directory, and I will be generating CSVs of information as attachments. I then script it, and sent it to the relevant people monthly. CSVs are great – they’re small, hold alot of information onscreen, […]

DFS: Visibility breeds Confidence

DFS: Visibility breeds Confidence

The greatest thing about technology is its ability to safe time and prevent issues. The worst thing is for it to break, be problematic, and worst of all – be symptomatic without anyone realizing. When you don’t know, you can’t be confident you have it under control. And then everyone panics.

Breaking the ice

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Welcome to my blog. This is the standard first post before I get right into brain dumping interesting Powershell scripts, IT issues, and sword fighting tactics in the hope that someone else might find the information useful.