Nov 06 2014
I am troubleshooting an issue where a domain controller pins its CPU at 100% for extended periods and as a result, LDAP authentication requests fail causing organization wide application failures. I recently posted a HOWTO on setup and configuration of the Server Performance Advisor tool from Microsoft. This is the tool that allows you to …
Oct 20 2014
This quick HOWTO is a PowerShell script I wrote to monitor concurrent connections to a server. In this case we have a domain controller that is not behaving properly and I suspect it may be due to some kind of port exhaustion. The script is very quick and dirty but since it works I figured …
Oct 20 2014
There are countless situations where an IT professional needs to parse through a log file. In most instances, notepad/notepad2/notepad++ are enough to get in, find the information required and get out. But what if your log files are large. As in 20GB a day large. None of the typical editing tools will help you in …
Sep 19 2014
We will be applying production windows updates to all of our production servers shortly and I wanted to manually verify that we had at least 2GB free on all of our C: drives in preparation for the update. We have automated monitoring systems but I wanted to grab the information directly to ensure it was …
Sep 18 2014
I am in a situation where I need to delete a critical production Database server computer object in Active Directory for an upgrade but in the event that upgrade fails, I will need to restore the original computer object. To that end I found an excellent Technet blog on the subject at http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/08/27/the-ad-recycle-bin-understanding-implementing-best-practices-and-troubleshooting.aspx. But for …
Sep 16 2014
When working with Active Directory from PowerShell, you’ll often find yourself using the Get-ADUser cmdlet. You’ll find yourself often looking up user accounts by typing something like Get-ADUser jsmith which works just fine as jsmith is the samaccountname for a user in Active Directory. But what happens if you want to look up by Display Name? Or more commonly, …
May 23 2014
I had a situation where I needed to create a bunch of service accounts using pre-created complex passwords. Now there are tons of Powershell scripts online to accomplish just this but in my brief searching they all seemed either too simplistic or far too complex. So I decided instead to draft my own. You can …
Mar 31 2014
I created the script below to back up the DHCP servers in our environment, set it up as a nightly scheduled task and then frankly forgot about it. That is until a few days ago when due to a power outage, we lost a DHCP server that refused to boot once power was restored. Thanks …
Feb 13 2014
This HOWTO describes how to reconfigure an existing NetApp DataFabric Manager installation with preexisting Snap Vault relationships when the primary hostnames and IPs change and to accomplish all of this without needing to re-baseline. Consider the situations where you have a NetApp Filer that you want to replace with a new Windows file server …
Feb 08 2014
This HOWTO describes how to rename a VMware virtual machine’s underline files inside the VMFS file system. It turns out that the name that is displayed in the vSphere Web Client and VI Client is simply a display name. It is actually attached to an underline UUID that describes that machine. That UUID is associated …
