This HOWTO is a proof of concept to demonstrate a way to take an Active Directory environment on one server and restore it to a different server on an entirely different network.  The scenario in this example is we have a domain controller which has a number of other third party applications installed and we wish to migrate just the AD portion to a new dedicated Active Directory server in a separate environment.  Once completed, the old server will be permanently powered off.

We will have two systems, one called PRODDC1.  This is our production system hosting Active Directory and all of our other applications.  The second system is called initially NEWDC1.  This is a fresh copy of Windows 2012 R2 with no configuration of any kind, not even a hostname or IP assigned.  Crucially, these two systems are on isolated networks and cannot see each other.

On PRODDC1

• From Server Manager, installed the Windows Server Backup Feature
• Once installed, run Windows Server Backup and from the left menu choose Backup Once
• Choose Custom and select only System State

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Webroot has recently released a new REST API that allows us as administrators to pull detailed endpoint data programmatically. What this effectively means is that all of the information that is presented to us in the Webroot Global Site Manager can now be extracted directly and integrated into other processes. I very much wanted a script that would be able be able to run on a scheduled task and compare all the systems in Active Directory with those registered in Webroot and then report on those AD systems that either do not have Webroot installed or haven’t checked in for more than a week.

It took some reading and trial and error but I managed to create a PowerShell script that can connect to Webroot and pull all of the details for every endpoint for a given keycode into an object which you can then do whatever you want with. I figured I’d save you the frustration of figuring out how to make this. Of course this code is presented as is. It’s working for me but your mileage may vary.

Here’s how it works:

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Do you use VMware Workstation on Windows?  Do you run more than a handful of VMs?  Have you ever had your host CPU pinned by one of the instances of vmware-vmx.exe but the only way you could figure out which VM was the issue was by logging into each one and checking CPU usage there?  I found myself in this situation and figured there had to be a better way.  I realized that each VM runs as its own separate vmware-vmx.exe process.  I further figured out that the .VMX file that includes the name of the running VM is part of the command line arguments used to call it.  Putting this information together, I wrote a simple PowerShell script that is intended to be run on the Windows Host that will show all running VMs and their current CPU usage.  Note that the totals are for each VM, not of the host.  This is why multiple VMs can show 100% usage.

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I have previously discussed how to use a Windows based computer to write in Japanese and Chinese.  The time has come to tackle the next of the Asian languages, Vietnamese.  As before, the same disclaimer applies.  The information below is what I was able to figure out based on information primary from Google and Wikipedia.  Some or perhaps even much of it may be incomplete but it does appear to at least be logically consistent.  At first I thought typing in Vietnamese would be considerably easier since the language at first blush appeared to use the Roman alphabet, just as English does.  Therefore, I expected it to be as simple as “Select the Vietnamese keyboard and start typing”.  As I started researching however, I found this was not the case at all.

There are a couple of important things to be aware of when trying to write Vietnamese on an English keyboard.  Let’s assume you’ve used the “Language” Control panel applet and added the “Vietnamese” language already.  Once installed, you press the “Preview” button to see what the keyboard looks like this:

The first thing that will probably jump out at you is that all of the numeric digits on the keyboard have been replaced with special characters along with the open and closed square brackets, dash and equals keys.  Why is that?  To understand this, we’ll have to look at how the Vietnamese alphabet is constructed.

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Are you interested in Office 365 and ADFS but are intimidated by it and not sure where to begin?  If that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place.  I have been studying to write my 70-346 (Managing Office 365 Identities Exam) and realized that I was still really weak on ADFS and how all the pieces work together.  I decided I wanted to build a fully fleshed out ADFS environment in my own lab complete with a new Office 365 tenant and ADFS configured in high availability with the recommended 4 servers (redundant federation and redundant proxy servers). So that’s what I did and I’m going to walk you through the entire setup, starting from the very beginning.

Prerequisites 

All the links download are free for testing purposes. To follow along with this HOWTO you will need:

Credit where credit is due.  This HOWTO is based on basic ADFS deployment documentation found here: :
http://nolabnoparty.com/en/adfs-3-0-setup-upn-suffix-for-office-365-sso-pt-1/

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I recently upgraded my laptop from the now four year old Lenovo W530 to a shiny new Lenovo P50 complete with a Xeon 2.8Ghz CPU, 64GB of RAM and an NVME M.2 boot drive.  Not only did I upgrade the hardware but I also switched from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.  So far so good.

Being that I’ve always owned laptops, I always try to take precautions against data loss through theft via full disk encryption.  With the release of BitLocker, this has been an remarkably seamless security improvement and I’ve used Bitlocker transparently for years.  So far so good.

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This is a quick fun little HOWTO.  The was an article on CollegeHumor today that looked like this:

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101101 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110101 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100100 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01110010 00101110 00100000 01001000 01100101 01101100 01110000 00100000 01110101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01000111 01101111 01100100 00101110

I was of course curious what the message above actually said so I wondered how quickly I could figure that out with PowerShell.  The answer?  Pretty gosh darn quick.

((gc c:\temp\binary.txt) -split " " | % { [char]([convert]::ToInt32("$_",2)) }) -join ""

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This HOWTO came about after watching the excellent video series on using Process Explorer available here:

Case of the Unexplained: Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich

In this video, he talks about a case where wmiprvse.exe was causing Bluray video playback to stutter. 
If you have worked in IT for any length of time, you’ve probably seen this executable come up during your troubleshooting.  It’s the "WMI provider host".
I’ve known that for a while but what happens inside this process has always been a black box for me… until now that is.

If you ever run into an issue where wmiprvse.exe is misbehaving, follow these simple troubleshooting steps:

1) Launch Event Viewer, go to View and enable Show Analytic and Debug Logs

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This HOWTO covers a real world example of how to use Convert-FromString which was introduced in PowerShell 5.  As a reminder, this is the powerful new cmdlet that allows you to parse any kind of text data and convert the resulting data into structured PowerShell objects by defining “templates” for how the data is laid out and what information you want to extract.

The largest mall in my city includes literally hundreds of stores. I needed to shop for a particular kind of thing and wanted to know what stores I might want to check out.  I started by visiting the website for the mall.  This ended up giving me output that looked like this:

It’s not bad certainly but I would like to apply some filters to the dataset.  Now in reality, I could have certainly figured out what I wanted from this website but I realized this would be a great opportunity to see if I could make the ConvertFrom-String and FlashExtract do something useful.  Could I make a PowerShell object out of this data?

The first thing I did was download the webpage in PowerShell using the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet.  Powershell includes a “parseddata” object that tries to break down any webpage into its component parts and return the results as nested objects.  I looked at the output and discovered that all of the data I was interested in was stored in parseddata.documentElement.outertext.  This gave me the following results:

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PowerShell 5.0 introduces a wonderful new cmdlet called ConvertFrom-String.  Don’t let the simple name deceive you though.  There is some exceptionally complex math running behind the scenes here to do some truly wonderful things.
In fact, the code that gets executed inside this function is based upon the "FlashExtract" project completed by Microsoft Research.  How much math? Well here is a portion of the algorithm that was published in their whitepaper.

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/pubs/pldi14-flashextract.pdf

The idea here is to give us as administrators the ability to take some existing complex text data, intelligently analyze it and convert it into native PowerShell objects. 
Technically we can already do this today using regular expressions.  But coming up with the right combination of letters and characters to produce the intended results is no easy task.  At least until now.
The idea here is that instead of trying to micro manage exactly character-by-character how you want to extract the data to get to the content you want, you instead simply ‘tell’ PowerShell want you want.
Specifically, you pass the ConvertFrom-String function a marked up template of the data that indicates which data is important.

It’s hard to understand in writing but will make a lot more sense once you see it in action.  This is also when the "ah ha" moment comes and you realize the power this new cmdlet offers.

For our example, we’re going to take a look at the c:\windows\windowsupdate.log.  This is a plain text log file that contains several columns:

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