Robert Vance

Author's posts

HOWTO: Stop VMs from locking when idle

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.  You build a bunch of new VMs for your lab environment.  You have them all running but every time you switch back to a VM you find that it’s always locked and you  have to press Control-Alt-Delete and enter your password.  In a production environment, this is …

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HOWTO: Build Tasklist for Studying for Microsoft Exams

This HOWTO is fairly specific to me but since I needed to document it anyway I figured I would share it in case in benefited others. I have scheduled yet another Microsoft Exam for October.  One of the techniques I use during studying is to take the base “Skills Measured” list from Microsoft and build …

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HOWTO: Enable SharePoint Enabled Lists with Office 365

Imagine this scenario.  You have a SharePoint 2007/2010/2013 server in your environment along with an Exchange 2007/2010/2013 server.  You have configured email-enabled lists in your SharePoint environment by leveraging an SMTP server configured on your SharePoint server along with a send connector on your Exchange server.  Everything works great and people can email an address …

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HOWTO: Clear all AD Attributes from Former OCS/Lync Deployment

Imagine for a moment you have just deployed Office 365 in your environment using a cutover migration.  Everything is working well and you’ve now decided to grant access for your users to use Skype for Business.  (I so hate that name). You find that some users are not appearing in the Skype For Business Users …

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Windows 10 and the future of software installations

Windows 10 is nearly upon and one of the features I am looking forward to is PowerShell 5.  More specifically I am looking forward to the new PowerShellGet module. This is effectively apt-get or yum for Windows and the implications for systems administrators are significant.  I just finished a quick test drive of the functionality …

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HOWTO: Access Pleasant Password Server Passwords via RESTful API

If you use Pleasant Password Server, you may have a need to request passwords from a command line or automated process.  If you do, the script below should be very helpful. It took me most of the evening to figure out how to request passwords using PowerShell and the RESTful API built into Pleasant Password …

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HOWTO: Implement PowerShell Certificates End-To-End

I needed to run a PowerShell script on a few dozen machines scattered across just as many disconnected networks. I wanted to ensure that if anyone in the future attempted to make changes to the script that it would no longer execute.  This means learning how to implement PowerShell certificates.  After much Googling I found …

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HOWTO: Fix CID Mismatch Error in VMware Workstation

Previously I’ve posted a HOWTO for resolving a CID mismatch issue with virtual machines and snapshots when those VMware are running on ESXi.  That can be found here: https://pleasework.robbievance.net/howto-resolve-cid_mismatch-error-with-vmware-virtual-machine/ But what happens if you have the same error under VMware Workstation (11)?  Today I had a reason to detach a secondary disk from one VM …

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HOWTO: Show absolutely All Nested Properties of a PowerShell Object in a Treeview

If you’ve used PowerShell for length of time at all, I promise this HOWTO is going to be revelation and will fundamentally change how you use PowerShell. PowerShell is full of objects.  All of those objects have properties.  Many of those properties have their own sub properties.  Those child properties can then still have even …

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HOWTO: Easily delete folder paths with long names – for free!

If you’ve been in IT for any length of time, you’ve run into issues where you’ve been asked to delete folders that users have created that are longer than 260 characters.  If you try to delete the folder, you get something like: So you start Googling and invariably you’ll find the same tool recommended over …

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