Scripting

This falls into the “Come on Microsoft” category.

I have been writing a script that will gather a bunch of information from servers, and returns an object with the information.  Part of what I’m gathering is the servers that are set to auto start, and have their corresponding service stopped.

While you can get a list of services that meet part of this criteria like this:

I was lucky enough to spend the previous week in New Orleans, LA at Microsoft TechEd. I had a great time checking out the latest and greatest that our Redmond buddies are about to throw our way or has already tossed.

I spent the majority of my time focusing on Sharepoint 2013 and Exchange 2013, but I was able to spend some time focusing on the client side of things as well. One thing in particular that stood out to me in this area is how Microsoft is putting a lot of time and development into making their clients “Cloud Friendly”.  Office 2013 is the first version that fully supports cloud storage providers.

Microsoft has graciously strategically provided us with built in compatibility with Skydrive. While this makes things easy to get things up and running, it makes any IT Admin experience a combination of nausea, anger, and anxiety.  If you’re fortunate enough to have a sponsored, approved, supported cloud storage solution, you’ll undoubtedly want to use it.

I’ll show you how to accomplish just that in this post.

I encountered a challenge today that was fun to fix.  There’s an Organizational Unit in my AD setup that has historically been used to store disabled AD objects instead of deleting them.

When an employee leaves the organization, our standard procedure  is as followed:

1. Disable User Object
2. Move to separate OU (IE AD://internal.msd/disabled/users)
3. Update Description field with something like: Disabled by [username] on [date]
4. Retain user object for x amount of days, then tombstone it.

Best laid plans of mice and men… yada yada…

So yesterday I talked about using a Powershell script with in Solarwinds to monitor volume sizes. Using the NetApp Data ONTAP Toolkit, we have the ability to do monitor a lot of different things, and track the information using Solarwinds. In this post I will show how to monitor SnapMirror relationships using Solarwinds.

I was unable to find any examples for how to do this online, so I came up with my own solution using the NetApp Data ONTAP toolkit as well as a slight modification of your powershell profile.

I have been using the NetApp Data ONTAP toolkit a lot lately, and I’m going to throw some tutorials on this site relating to it.

Let’s go through the steps we need to follow to get the toolkit installed on your machine.

I once had a person tell me that the most successful individuals in IT are lazy.  Years after hearing that, the notion has stuck with me and translates into much of how I attach problems.

If you’re like me, you use putty to connect to servers via SSH frequently. Now, I know that you can use key based authentication using puttygen, but in the scenario that you don’t want to go that route, you can use the method below to create windows shortcuts to automatically log into a host using putty.