Jeff Patton

25 hours a day, 8 days a week, how does he do it?

Posts by Year

2024 4
2023 12
2022 23
2017 3
2015 4
2014 9
2013 8
2012 24
2011 15
2010 40
2009 21
2008 24
2007 15

2024

A whole lot of nothing, until there was something

This week was filled with a lot of meetings, a few unexpected, and at least one was mandatory. I always hated those mandatory meetings, they always went the ...

Github Actions and Ramifications of moving

The majority of this week was spent yet again waiting for others, but the good news is I think I may be on the home stretch of my actual work. Honestly I was...

Querying PowerShell Gallery and Nuget.org

I’ve decided that I want to changeup how I display my projects on the blog, I think I could create a landing page for all my code and then create dedicated l...

First week of the New Year

We’ve started a new year and this year my goal is to improve my communication skills, start writing more and really try and get back into my music. One of th...

2023

Azure Devops Pipelines : Lesson’s Learned

Azure DevOps Pipelines serve as a cornerstone for automating software delivery, offering a robust framework to streamline CI/CD processes. In this exploratio...

Managing Template Output Variables Across Azure DevOps Pipelines

Introduction

Azure DevOps Pipelines and Templates with Azure KeyValues

Introduction

Creating a report in Jira

I’ve been doing a lot lately with ChatGPT, nothing terribly exciting and I think I’ll write a post about that at some point, most likely next year, big plans...

There are no dumb questions!

One of the many wonderful people I work with at Rackspace recently asked if they could as a dumb question. I taught technical classes for over 12 years befor...

Well this is fun!

I’ve started working on the latest version of my AzDevOps PowerShell Module, and I’ve run into an error that has me stumped.

PackageManagement/nuget fails to pull release from AzureDevops

At work I use Azure Devops Artifacts to store the Modules and C# libraries that I work with. I leverage the views for Release and Pre-Release as a way for me...

Are you kidding me?

So my last post talked about using secrets and azure key vault, and maybe touched a little on the dangers of committing passwords and the like into a reposit...

Publish to Github Packages

This goes along with my last post. I want to be able to consume a package from the Github Packages location within the org, so we need a way to publish there...

Securing Secrets in Visual Studio

When working on a project locally it can be easy to simply add secret information into the appsettings.json file. The upside to this is that it’s quick and e...

A MongoDB Repository Framework Design

I’m working with MongoDB, if you don’t know I’ve created a nice little PowerShell module, PoshMongo, that allows you to work with MongoDB, you can find it on...

How I work

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of development work in C# and PowerShell. The bulk has been PowerShell modules, but I’ve also done quite a bit of work on API’s ...

2022

May I Pester you?

Sorry, I couldn’t resist, I’ve been pretty busy, and over the past few weeks I’ve been completely overhauling our entire build process. One of things I’ve do...

JSON, Strings and Constructors

I don’t know how other folks work, but I tend to work in blocks of time and occasionally those happen to line up with my working hours, but that’s not always...

DataTables, Nulls, Strings, Ints and Casting

I’ve been very focused on my work lately, and it’s been gratifying. I’ve learned a great deal in the past few weeks. So let’s recap, I’m working on a solutio...

WTF Write-Verbose

So I’ve been working on some really fun things at work that tie into some of the projects that I’m personally working on, which I guess is par for the course...

Introducing GithubClient

Introducting GithubClient, I started working on this because we had a need to pull information from one of our Organizational repositories. It started out as...

Has it really been 4 months?

Well, here we are again, I’d apologize but sometimes real life takes a priority and there’s nothing you can do about it. Since I last updated I’ve bought a n...

Last Week

It’s been a minute and I apologize, last week was filled with meetings and interviews so been kind of busy with tedius work that I’m not a fan of. I did work...

Last Week

I missed the week in review this past Friday, sorry about that. It was spring break here so I was off an on and we had company so nothing was really condusiv...

Week In Review: 03/11/2022

Well it’s been a busy week for sure, two days wrapped up in Microsoft Interviews and I’ll be blunt, I wasn’t selected, but this is the furthest I’ve gone in ...

Github Actions and PSDocs

Today I did some work on the MultiCloudDeployment project. I had wanted to add the option to pass in Resource Groups to the ARM template,because that is some...

Microsoft Interviews

So, I applied for a Senior Software Engineering Role with Microsoft, specifically with the Deployment Team that handles the Azure Resource Manager Deployment...

OSD and UEFI and a missing WinRE

So purely by chance I came across a tweet talking about a new release of OSDCloud. I had no idea what it was so I clicked the links. As far as I can tell OSD...

Customizing Jekyll and Minima

I thought I would sneak one in as I did a little tweaking on the site today. I use a nice font on my computer, hack. I set this as the default for vsCode and...

Week In Review: 03/04/2022

Literally next to nothing happened this week, getting ready to sell the house so new carpet was installed. I had the opportunity to catch the flu and spent t...

Week In Review: 02/25/2022

Here we are another week in the books, and I’ve been super busy and just kind of forgot so I wanted to get this out real quick. It’s been busy around here, a...

SchemaModule 3.0.1 Release

I’ve just released a new version of my PowerShell SchemaModule.

Week In Review: 02/18/2022

Welcome to another Friday! Congratulations you made it!

The tedious side of development

So I’ve been working on things both personally and for work. Both projects have similar goals but are implemented differently. But one of the things that I r...

Language Parsing

Yesterday I talked about changing up the framework to make it more flexible. Ideally the framework shouldn’t need to know all the details about a given templ...

Multi-Cloud Deployment Framework

So the way the original framework was designed was from a console perspective. While it was designed to be run from an Azure Devops Build Agent an engineer c...

Week In Review: 02/11/2022

Happy Friday! Most of this week has been involved with meetings and getting this site all sorted out, but I’d like to review what I’ve been working on so you...

What would you say, you do here?

Let’s start with a brief history. I started at Rackspace in July of 2016 as a DevOps Engineer III and orignally worked in the Azure Support Team. For about a...

Welcome Back

It has been a while since I’ve done anything here and I apologize. I’ve been really wrapped up in work, and migrating my site once again was something I was ...

2017

Create VSTS Service Principal

Working with one of our CSP customer’s and they needed to connect their Visual Studio Team Services account to their CSP Azure account. If you have a regular...

Fix Windows Server 2012 R2 DFSR EventID 4614

Recently had a ticket come in where a newly created Domain with two DC’s was not replicating properly. Upon logging into the DC’s I noted the following log e...

Stuck in Maintenance Mode

It’s been ages, I do have plans to start writing again, and in fact this particular posting came about because I was going to write up something I just came ...

2015

Automating 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 a...

DSC + 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 h...

DISM…‘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.

Bulk 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 ...

2014

I have an addiciton problem

At first I thought I had a drinking problem. As evidence by the picture below, I drink A LOT of coffee!

Week 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 actual...

Week In Review: 07/2/2014

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 t...

Week 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 on...

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 ho...

Week 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 t...

Week 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 ...

System Center Orchestrator 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 ...

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...

2013

Showing 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. T...

DSC Part 3

It’s been a busy day, I haven’t posted anything since July and today three posts!

DSC 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 s...

DSC 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 ...

Setspn.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?

Hyper-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 wha...

Windows 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.

SCOM 2007 R2 and Get-Event

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. Recentl...

2012

SCOM 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 –Cri...

DPM 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 serv...

Managing 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 creat...

Powershell 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...

Printing 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...

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...

Exporting 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 f...

Get 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 ...

RedHat 6 Enterprise + Vmware Vsphere

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 conf...

HA/FDM fails to restart a virtual machine with the error: Failed to open file /vmfs/volumes/UUID/.dvsData/ID/100 Status (bad0003)= Not found

This came across my newsfeed last night and this morning, and before I lose the links I thought I’d post them up here.

Updated 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 scr...

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 hav...

Weekly 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...

Windows Eventlog Management Part 2

HOW TO GET THE LOG TO LET YOU KNOW WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENED

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...

ExitCodes 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...

PowerShell 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, th...

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...

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 b...

RDP 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.

Library 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. T...

Defrag 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 th...

Repository 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 se...

New 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 hostin...

2011

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,...

SCCM + 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 nearl...

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!

HOWTO: 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:

Do you suffer from ‘Premature Installation’?

Or, “What’s in a name?”

Preparing to upgrade DC’s to Windows Server 2008 R2

We decided it was time to move to R2 on the domain controllers, while we’re at it we also moved up to Windows 2008 Functional. Sadly we can’t go to 2008r2 fu...

ActiveDirectory Replication issues and IPv6

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc756648(v=ws.10).aspx

Subversion auto-props

I’ve been really busy working with and learning PowerShell and dutifully committing my code into my subversion repo. For the most part it’s been really fun a...

Powershell

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything and a lot has been going on.

Windows 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 g...

Customized DOS Shell

A fair amount of my time is spent at the command-line, and as such I want it to work in a particular way. Since I don’t want to lose this information the nex...

Google Reader feed to Blogengine blogroll.xml

So I wanted the list of blogs I follow in Google Reader to be displayed on my website. Blogengine uses XML files for just about everything, so I decided I wo...

Updated Theme

So I’ve spent the past few days working up a new theme for the site. I’ve been wanting something that looked similar to a newspaper, and I think I came prett...

Welcome to the new site

I’ve been running on an OpenVZ server from PhotonVPS for quite some time now. That server was running on Ubuntu Server 9.10 (I was wrong Carson), and the sit...

New Google Homepage

2010

Managing a Server Core fileserver

So, you want to manage that Server Core now I suppose. Well, ok but you will need to do a few things first…

Windows Server Core 2008 R2 File Server

In order to work around an issue we are currently experiencing with System Center Configuration Manager and Windows 2008 R2 Failover Clustering, we need to s...

SCCM and Windows 2008 R2 Failover Clustering

So yesterday we were able to migrate our existing Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 file cluster to the Windows 2008 equivalent of the same. It has been a long ...

Evolution and Exchange 2010

So you want Evolution to attach to Exchange natively, not unlike Outlook? The simple answer to your question is evolution-mapi. This lovely plugin allows you...

Windows Exit Codes and Error Codes

So historically we have rebooted the lab computers once a week. The reason for doing this originally was to clear our local profile data, and empty the temp ...

Fun things to know and share about the Dell PowerEdge NX3000 NAS Appliance

This was originally going to be a post about setting up a cluster on the NX3000, but I’ve had some fun messing around with them, so I thought I would share t...

Redeeming my IT card

So flat in the middle of standing up a new file server cluster and writing about it, in draft, and tweeted a few things that Carson nailed me on. First, I am...

‘Single node cluster’ oxymoron or reality?

You might be asking yourself, what? how? why? To be honest I asked myself the very same questions. I don’t purport to have all the answers to these important...

What to do when you receive a truly horrible request

I’m fairly certain this happens more often than not. A user fashion’s an email, than in their mind makes perfect and complete sense. They blithely send this ...

How to attach a custom task to an event on WS08

In an earlier post I talked about how to forward events from one machine to another. That works out quite well, but unless you’re sitting at the log and watc...

Forwarding Events from WS08 Core DC

There were some changes between Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the one I’m interested in is WinRM. The default HTTP port on Windows Server 2...

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Print Logging

Yesterday I got a support ticket that stated the user was unable to connect to any printers on the network. I found this odd since we push out printers via G...

Managing your network interfaces for VMware Player

If you need to reconfigure your virtual network, you will need the vmnetcfg.exe utility. This is part of the VMware Player download, but you have to run the ...

Working with computer objects

So I’m working with computer objects, if you can’t tell from my previous post. There are times when what you really want to know about a given computer is, w...

Active Directory Naming Strategy

Does anyone have a good naming convention for Active Directory? It’s all completely subjective, what works for one organization is absolutely horrible for th...

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Or, How to fix your Novell clients so they don’t get hosed up times! If you don’t know this, when a computer in an Active Directory domain gets an invalid ti...

The usefulness of TCPDUMP

We are mid-firewall migration, it’s set to happen in about 2hrs from this post. But in the middle of trying to figure out why we are getting crazy network ou...

One admin, multiple domains

So I want to be able to have a single Django admin site for more than one domain. After talking it over with Carson, he showed me what needed to be done. It’...

SQL Management Express and Microsoft##SSEE

Download and install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express

Delegation of OU and GPO’s

Why does printing need to be so complicated? Admittedly a portion of the problem falls on us running our own domain. At times it can be irritating, like now,...

Delegation of OU and GPO’s

Recently A department within the School wanted to leverage the capabilities that we currently provide many other departments. They currently run their own do...

Subversion and svnsync

First things first, I am in no way proficient in how subversion works, but I am usually pretty good at reading documentation and then being able to work out ...

Django and Windows

You will need several things before you begin:

DPM Finally Complete

Not really a whole lot to say here, just really happy that my backup of user data is complete! It has taken about a month to get a successful backup and now ...

OEMStringArray and VMware

OEMStringArray as defined by Microsoft will contain:

Registry size limit…who knew?

This past Friday we pushed out 30 new lab machines. These machines were imaged the same way we image the rest of our labs. We noticed that several applicatio...

Drupal to Django Migration

To be honest I completely ripped off Carson, he has been talking on and off about this for a while. I decided about a week ago that I would give it a stab, a...

Windows Server 2008 R2 Core Net Server

I wanted to setup a DNS and DHCP server for my home network. I could have used a Linux server to do this, but I wanted to write about server core. I also wan...

Production Script: UpdateADDescription

The UpdateADDescription is run hourly on a computer connected to the domain. It’s sole purpose is to loop through all the computers in a given OU and update ...

DPM 2007, Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2008 Core Domain Controllers

Still bringing services online after our recent hardware upgrade, today’s goal was to make DPM 2007 go. The original server was a PoiwerEdge 1950 with a MD10...

WSS 3.0, MSSearch Service and SQL

In my previous post I talked about the SQL upgrade that we performed recently. I left out the part that had to do with our SharePoint server. While it is fun...

SQL Server Upgrade

In an earlier post I mentioned that we were in the process of upgrading hardware and moving something’s around on the back-end. The end-result of this proces...

Fun with Vmware ESXi

In the course of rolling out new hardware we encountered some problems with our up-and-running VMware ESXi servers. I won’t go into that now, but I’ll go ove...

Windows 2008 R2 Clustering

Our current file server cluster falls out of warranty in about a month, and as it was over-spec’d to begin with we made a purchase of new hardware from Dell....

The value of virtualization

From time to time I think that we all sometimes overlook the value of virtualization. I know that I do, and it came home to me today. We have a problem with ...

Extending a Virtual Disk on the MD3000i

We purchased our new iSCSI SAN this past summer and one of the important features for us was the ability to resize a lun as needed. The Dell MD3000i gave us ...

Finding Enabled User Accounts

I was recently notified that one of the computers that we’re responsible for had been compromised by Torpig. The way I understand it is the user launches a w...

Group Policy Preferences in a mixed environment

We were recently directed to push Windows 7 out to the network which triggered the previous post on Windows 7 deployment. In order to make this happen we mad...

Unified Startup Script

Following along with the Unified Logon Script, there is also a Unified Startup Script. Again with the release of Windows 7 much of what we did via script tec...

Unified Logon Script

This script is entirely too long to publish as a page, you can find it in my public repo at the following URL.

2009

Windows 7 Deployment: Part 1 Testing

We recently upgraded our System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) server to SP2, and according to Carson everything went just fine, which is always good ne...

Managing Power Savings for XP via GPO

You can manage the power savings features of both Windows XP and Vista using a GPO in a domain environment. In order to do this you will need to get Group Po...

Various PHP related messages

ntwdblib.dll: This application has failed to start because ntwdblib.dll was not found. Re-install the application may fix this problem

Manual installation of IIS, PHP and MySql

Last week I posted an article about how I configured IIS, PHP and MySQL using Microsoft’s Web PI 2.0 technology, which was wicked easy. Today I figured I wou...

PHP, Pear and Windows

When running PHP I receive the following message:

IIS, PHP, MySQL and Web PI

I’ve posted a couple of things last week regarding how I use Virtual PC, and since recently I’ve been downloading web apps that need php and mysql I figured ...

Building Servers

Building a server, using the method I outlined in my previous post, becomes cake.

Windows/Linux Server Base Image

I do a lot of software evaluations and as such I have come to rely quite heavily on virtualzation so I don’t have to worry about setting up hardware. As the ...

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Request Tracker

Looking at some different possibilities regarding desktop support, so I’m outlining the steps I took to get a working copy of RT up and running on an Ubuntu ...

Views and the Cloud

One of the things I’ve enjoyed recently are tag clouds I have no good explanation for it other than they look cool. So since I just finished migrating all my...

Tagging

This afternoon I imported all my stubs into the vbs link above. On the way home I thought it would be really nice if I had tagged them initially to make it e...

Pathing

Ok, so I enabled the Path module in drupal and went through and pathed all the pages on the site that I care about. It’s totally eye candy I know, but it mak...

Summer 2009

Deploy new SharePoint server using SQL as the backend Upgrade SAN storage capacity Re-IP CX3-20

Windows 7 RTM!

So this is not really related to work, but Windows 7 RTM’d the other day and both my Technet Subscription and Windows 7 Beta downloads became available today...

Dell MD3000i

Two weeks ago the new storage array arrived. We have moved from Fibre Channel to iSCSI almost exclusively because of cost. At the rate at which our existing ...

Hacking Sharepoint

LOOK & FEEL CONFIGURATION

Splitting a single Sharepoint Site

DISCLAIMER

iSCSI Solutions

iSCSI provides a cost-effective, unified method for accessing storage from various vendors. My example is an old free-standing Compaq Drive array and a rack ...

Configure simple Sharepoint farm

Requirements:

Spring Break Projects

Roll Sophos to the computing labs

Sharepoint Upgrade

Current Situation:

2008

How we use the Active Directory

We rely on a lot of Microsoft tech to keep things clicking here at the School, and nothing is more important than our Active Directory Infrastructure. When I...

VLAN’s, VMware ESxi, and Redhat EL

In environments were more than 4 VLAN’s exist you will have some difficulties getting all of them trunked into your VM’s. The best way seems to be trunking a...

DNS and DHCP Implementation

The School hosts its own Active Directory Infrastructure, this infrastructure depends on a DNS server that fully supports RFC 2136. Our administrative model ...

Microsoft Clustering

Some things I’ve recently learned while working in a non dynamic environment.

SOE Overview

I have been with the School of Engineering since February of 2007 and in that time we have moved from technology that was 1995 centric to an almost current l...

Configure Quickbooks for Windows Server

In a client/server environment multiple users connect to the Quickbooks server to access data files. There are two methods for this:

Intuit Quickbooks 9.0 Upgrade

Summary:

Summer 2008

A large number of projects commenced:

Query AD

After writing the script that generates the lab usage report, I looked at the BuildArray procedure and decided to change it to be more generic. This would al...

Update Array

The UpdateArray procedure updates the arrLabs array. The purpose of this procedure is to generate a tallies that will be used to in a report to display lab u...

Script Details

I just wrote the ScriptDetails function today, I wanted better information in the Application Log regarding what script executed, where was it located, and w...

Build Array

The BuildArray procedure connects to the provided domain and returns a list of requested objects. Then it loops through those objects checking for a specific...

Write to AD Objects

The WriteData procedure originally was used to update the Description property of computer objects in the Active Directory. The procedure can now update any ...

How I use scripting

I work with two developers, in order to reduce the amount of teasing I decided to modularize all of my code. I have several functions and subroutines that I ...

Get Serial

About 99.9% of the computers we manage are Dell computers. Each Dell computer has a unique service tag that can be used to lookup anything from warranty info...

WMI Ping Script

Most of the computer management scripts run against multiple computers, I usually want to have the script do one task if the computer is available for manage...

Get MAC Address

In managing our IP space we rely heavily on the MAC address of a computer. This seems to be slightly backwards of how most people manage their IP space, but ...

Build Report

The BuildReport procedure is a basic file creation script. It verifies that the folder that is passed in exists before processing anything. I could have made...

Get Username

One of the things we find handy is the ability to know who is logged on to a given computer at any one time. The main reason is that our users rarely tell us...

Get Prop

GetProp is a generic function that is used to return single-valued properties from objects in the Active Directory. If the property is empty it writes an ent...

Winter 2008

The main thrust of this term was moving away from manual application installation and into a software lifecycle that provided automatic application installat...

How true it is…

I found this while searching for using GTK on Windows. Here is the thread.

Why ‘Scorched Earth’ can be a good thing

Historically here in the School of Engineering, software installation was handled by a single person. What I mean by this is, if a faculty person required sp...

The ‘new way’ or Software Lifecycles

Currently we have a very poor methodology of managing the host of software applications that we support on our network. The process is as follows: