Recently was migrating RADIUS server on Windows from one machien to another. Once new serer was ready had to reconfigure Cisco router to authenticate remote users against new RADIUS. After pointing Cisco to new RADIUS machine made a quick test to check if router can authenticate without any issues. Here is how ot do it quickly:

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During mass reainstallation/redeployment/migration of large number of PCs, always question about applications is raised.

How to deploy/deliver applications once all machines are resintalled?

If you have SCCM in the infrastructure, this might help a lot with automation. All you need is mapping between computer name and applications (to be more specific collection ids) and PowerShell console on SCCM server.

Then you just need to prepare input files for the script below and you can automate application deployment on mass scale.

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I use SecureCRT quite often to access Linux systems as well as network devices.

When going through one of the presentations on SecureCRT web page I found handy tip how to configure session logs to have it divided by date, time and session.

Screenshot below demonstrates settings for log file:

Basically parameters are set to:

• Log file name: %Y-%M-%D–%h-%m-%s.%t__%S(%H).txt
• Options / Start log upon connect: checked
• Custom log data / On each line: %h:%m:%s(%t):

These settings will create separate log file for each session every time connection will be established.

In addition to that each line will start with timestamp added by SecureCRT.

By default ADLDS does not allow to reset password on users created in ADLDS repository over connection without SSL. As sometimes there is a need to build test environment with ADLDS quick, SSL is the last thing which anyone would care about, especially if main thing to test is script automating password resets.

So, for convenience of the developers ADLDS allows to disable requirements for SSL connection to reset passwords. How to disable that reuqirement? See below how it was done on server where ADLDS was installed on port 50389:

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While using PhpStorm I tried to use remote PHP interpreter on my dev virtual machine. As I’m big openSUSE fan and user I have openSUSE Leap 42.1 as my development machine. Unfortunately there is no Xdebug for PHP distributed by default.

However, there is repository available, so it’s easy to add this missing component to my system.

Here is how…

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Script changes description of My Computer icon to display Computer: ComputerName

Can be very handy when troubleshooting computer remotely when we require user to tell us name of the computer user works on.
Script works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7.

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Tomasz Jagiello strikes back as guest writer 🙂 This time on Windows Event Collector configuration for DNS Event Log forwarding. Very good how-to with detailed configuration.

Design where via Group Policy a Domain Controller group will be configured to forward DNS Server events to a single collector.

To test and demonstrate Event Log Forwarding I built simple Lab environment:

• 2x Domain Controllers (DC1, DC2)
• 1x Event Collector (SRV1).

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If you want to send email from PowerShell script via Google Mail:

$SMTPServer = "smtp.gmail.com"
$SMTPPort = "587"
$SMTPUsername = "sender@gmail.com"
$SMTPPassword = "password"

$EmailSenderAddress = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailAddress("sender@gmail.com", "PowerShell Automated Email")

$EmailFrom = $EmailSenderAddress
$EmailTo = "recipient@gmail.com"
$EmailCc = "recipient@hotmail.com"
$EmailAttachment = "C:\Scripts\Attachment.txt"
$EmailSubject = "Automated Email with Report."
$EmailBody = @"
Please find attached report.
"@

$EmailMessage = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage
$EmailMessage.Subject = $EmailSubject
$EmailMessage.Body = $EmailBody
$EmailMessage.To.Add($EmailTo)
$EmailMessage.CC.Add($EmailCc)
$EmailMessage.From = $SMTPUsername
$EmailMessage.Attachments.Add($EmailAttachment)

$SMTPSession = New-Object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient($SMTPServer, $SMTPPort);
$SMTPSession.EnableSSL = $true
$SMTPSession.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($SMTPUsername, $SMTPPassword);
$SMTPSession.Send($EmailMessage)
Write-Host "Mail Sent"

Recently I needed to unzip file from PowerShell script. Here is result what I did use to achieve that:

$archiveDir = "C:\Downloads"
$fileZip = $archiveDir + "\file.zip"
$shell=new-object -com shell.application
$zip = $shell.NameSpace($fileZip)
foreach ($item in $zip.items())
{
 $shell.NameSpace($archiveDir).CopyHere($item)
}

As we can download SCOM 2012 RC from Microsoft, I decided to do quick installation in LAB environment. Whole test environment is based on VMware Workstation 8. Deployment of SCOM 2012 will be spread across few servers to separate certain functions (in fact similar to real-life deployments). For SCOM2012 deplyoment I will use following servers:

• lab-dc-01 – Domain Controller – Windows Server 2008 R2
• lab-sql-01 – SQL Server – Windows Server 2008 R2 + SQL Server 2008 R2
• lab-net-01 – SCOM 2012 Management Server – Windows Server 2008 R2 + SCOM 2012 Management Server
• lab-wks-01 – SCOM 2012 Management Console – Windows 7 x64 Ultimate + SCOM 2012 Management Console

This will be mainly screenshot tour through installation phases of SCOM2012.

Here is schematics of the lab:

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