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Front Page News
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As we jump head long into a new year of exciting advances for App-V I have been taking some time to reflect on the activities in the past year. I have spent much of the past year working with customers who are starting out with App-V for the first time. Worldwide there are over 22 million MDOP licenses that have been purchased. I had the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers who purchased some of those licenses. I worked with customers in government and private industry. The customers...
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Last time we played with having a script become a module and passing through variables from the command line. Which is nice. VERY nice. “Life is good” Nice. And a lot of the time, the system will just “let it run” if you forget to type in variables. It might not do anything actually USEFUL but it will run. But we’re going to take take last module we made and give it some “fallbacks”. Plug in information INCASE you forget. Or the next admin. Having...
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We’re going a little more into turning a script into a module. And again, don’t scare yourself off! They are easy to deal with! So here today, I’ll go the other way around. I’m going to take a simple script with a few built in Variables and modify it into a module that I can type IN those variables every time. Here’s one I use on a regular basis. It’s a simple thing that uses the Quest Active Roles and pulls up a list of users created in a specific...
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Ok let’s take a crack at this feature in Powershell V2 called Modules. Modules really aren’t all that difficult when you get down to it. It’s very much like taking a script and loading it into memory. Well maybe not exactly like that but the cool part is when you turn that script into a module (as long as it’s loaded) you don’t have to keep specifying the path to the script, and you could even pop it into your Profile file (since it’s just text) and add functions that make YOUR...
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A very good friend I’ve been in contact with on Twitter who is a die hard Mac/Linux guy that works in Windows sent me a message. “Need a vBscript to Query Active Directory for old accounts and disable them” At which point I immediately pointed out “Powershell” as the quicker and more direct solution. He in return sent back the specs to what he needed. Go through and disable accounts over XXX days Go through and delete accounts older than yyy days Accounts which are flagged with key words in the “Description”...
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One of the most IRRITATING and FRUSTATING things I had working in the field was dealing with multiple Domains. You’d have so many clients with their own Active Directory setups and each time you’d have to go directly to the Small Business Server to manage it, or try to have a machine dedicated to that purpose. Plus you might have tools you’d want to copy to the server to help in that process. A real pain in the you know what. But Along came Powershell and Quest ActiveRoles...
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I was chatting with Brian Bourne from CMS Consulting in Toronto about some Hyper-V R2 work that they have done recently. In the conversation Brian shared a ton of learning's from the field on some of the Hyper-V R2 upgrades, deployments and V2V/P2V migrations. I asked him to write up a post and he did, so much so that I had to split it into two posts. You can find Part 1 here ! ------------------------- The release of R2 has been a major step forward for Microsoft’s virtualization strategy....
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I was chatting with Brian Bourne from CMS Consulting in Toronto about some Hyper-V R2 work that they have done recently. In the conversation Brian shared a ton of learning's from the field on some of the Hyper-V R2 upgrades, deployments and V2V/P2V migrations. I asked him to write up a post and he did, so much so that I had to split it into two posts. ------------------------- The release of R2 has been a major step forward for Microsoft’s virtualization strategy. It has also meant a...
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Exchange 2010 has been released and available for a few weeks now and a lot of people are looking to deploy. I was chatting with Rick Shire, Senior Messaging Consultant at CMS Consulting , who has compiled a list of gotchas, things to look out for, as well as resources for you to be aware of when planning and Exchange 2010 deployment and/or upgrade. ------------------------------ Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 was released in early November of this year with a lot of positive reviews. ...
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Windows 7 has been RTMd for a few weeks now, and the general availability is quickly approaching. I wanted to share a few cool new features that have yet to be widely talked about, (at least I haven’t seen them blogged anywhere yet.) The first feature is actually hidden away, and I discovered while right clicking on a folder at the same time as I held down SHIFT. Normally if you just right click you get the following menu: If you SHIFT right click here is the menu you’ll see: notice you now have...
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One of the features that we talked about a few months ago during the Beta and RC of Windows 7 was the new federated search features . It came to our attention that the TLA federated search OSDX file was not compatible with Windows 7 RTM. So our first announcement is to say that we have fixed that and posted an updated version of the file available here . The original article will also download the newest file. Second as TheLazyAdmin is also now on Twitter we also built a Federated search provider...
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A few weeks ago Rodney wrote a great post about the new XP mode in Windows XP. This is based on a new version of Virtual PC. I wanted to take a moment to talk about the new version which was released in beta along with the Windows 7 RC. First this version of Virtual PC will only work with Windows 7, so earlier versions of Windows will have to stick with Virtual PC 2007. Second, you can run Windows Vista and windows 7 in a virtual PC, what is really cool is that you can get full Aero glass compatibility...
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Window 7 RC has been out for a few weeks now the TLA team has been busy learning and testing all the great new features. Your tip for today is on Windows 7 App Locker. Many of you know about Software Restriction Policies. They allow you to block the execution of a program by file name or hash calculation. Many of you probably also know how it was a race to block applications in our network with these methods. Users could change the name of the file, or applications updates so frequently that you...
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One of the major challenges with moving to a new OS is dealing with older applications. This was an issue with the release of Windows Vista and in order to mitigate that with Windows 7, Microsoft has released a feature called XP Mode, which runs a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine in the background that can be used to run legacy applications. What is really interesting is that as a user, you only see a shortcut on the desktop or start menu and interact with the application as you would any...
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Oh boy is this a feature designed for lazy admins. When I’m not writing and keeping the site up to date I’m usually onsite working for clients. Often I’m required to have multiple emails accounts active when working with various partners. Now this isn’t usually a problem except as many know you can’t have multiple exchange accounts open in outlook at the same time. This means that you need to create separate profiles for each Exchange account. This also means that you need to type in a password every...
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Setting a password for Directory Services Restore Mode is something that is done during the setup of Active Directory. As a best practice it has always been recommended to change that password on a regular basis, as you would with any other password. The challenge was the process to do this was complicated and required you to use NTDS in Windows 2003 . This has been addressed in Windows Server 2008 where we can now sync the DSRM password with a Domain Administrator account. There...
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In a previous entry, guest blogger Sean Kearney shared a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 directory services called the Active Directory Recycle Bin . Sean is back to show us how to recover those deleted objects. ------------------------- So you’ve done it. We all have. Deleted a user, group, OU by accident but thankfully you have 2008 R2 in place and the AD Recycle Bin enabled. To recover now is a breeze! Start by launching Powershell V2 on Server 2008 R2 and run...
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I’ve done it, I know people who have done it, and I bet you have done it before as well. Right-click an object in Active Directory Users and Computers and instead of clicking the properties link you accidentally hit delete. Boom, gone and the only way to get it back is via a restore from backup. Restart the DC, boots into Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM), restore the system state backup and apply either a authoritative or non-authoritative restore. Guest author, Sean Kearney,...
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A lot of people are making the switch from Virtual Server to Hyper-V lately. I’ve done it on my home network and Thelazyadmin.com servers are in progress of moving to Hyper-V as well. While you can simply copy over the VHD and create a new VM in Hyper-V and mounting that VHD there is a tool that can help you with this task. VMC2HV is a free tool that can be used to import a Virtual Server (or VirtualPC) based VM into Hyper-V. It is a pretty simple tool to use, specify the...
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One of the new command tools introduced in Windows Vista was powercfg. Essentially it’s a command line tool that enables users to control power settings. There are a lot of very granular setting that can be configured. To get an idea of what you can do with it just run the following command from the command line: powercfg –Help | more You’ll need to pipe that help output to a “more” because the standard command prompt settings won’t buffer the entire help output! A really cool new feature for Windows...
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PowerShell 2.0, included in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, includes a new Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) which provides you with a GUI based tool to write your scripts and learn PowerShell. To launch PowerShell 2.0 ISE simply drill down to Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> Windows PowerShell. Once that is launched you’ll see the ISE load and you are ready to begin. The top portion, aka the Script Pane, is your scripting environment which allows you to write PS scripts. ...
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A few weeks back we posted an entry on how to boot from a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 VHD . Booting from VHD is new to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 but one of the caveats was you needed a “clean” VHD to boot from. There is a very simple way to create this VHD using an open source tool available on the MSDN Code Gallery called WIM2VHD . WIM2VHD is a command line tool that converts the WIM image into a VHD you can use to boot off. It does have a few requirements… The prep machine has to be running...
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For as long as we have had Active Directory domains, we have been required to to join client to the domain while they were online and connected to AD. Without that the join would fail. Now you always had the ability to join with a script using the NETDOM command but with Windows Server 2008 R2 we can now join a client to our AD domain while offline. The real benefit hear is that there is no need to supply or enter domain admin credentials. As you’ll see below a TXT file is created but just for fun...
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The one thing I missed with Server Core was PowerShell. While you can run PowerShell cmdlets and scripts remotely, at times it would have been nice to run it locally. The reason PowerShell was not included was due to the lack of .NET in Server Core. That changes in R2. Windows Server Core 2008 R2 includes a subset of .NET which allows PowerShell, as well as other components like ASP.NET. Specifically Server Core R2 includes: .NET 2.0 .NET 3.0 and 3.5 Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Windows Communication...
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Green IT, Green IT, everywhere you turn there is something about Green IT. With increased power and cooling costs a lot of people are using virtualization to reduce these costs but Windows Server 2008 R2 brings a new feature called Core Parking which helps as well. It does this by moving all processing to a core (or cores) and putting the other cores to “sleep”. Image courtesy of Microsoft Corporation As processing power increases more cores “wake up” and take on the additional processing. ...
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