Categories
Tips, Tricks, & Tweaks

Run Flash Sites in 2021

What? You need to administer vCenter 6.5 in 2021, but the HTML5 UI only has partial functionality, and for some reason you can’t upgrade? Ignoring the fact you’ve been warned for almost two years about the retirement of flash…

Here’s the “Fix” to run flash apps after end of life in 2021.

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Categories
Admin Tools Information Technology PowerShell Scripting

PowerShell Active Directory Password Tool – When it was set and when it expires.

It’s Monday morning, the caffeine from your morning coffee still hasn’t hit you yet, and like clockwork %USERNAME% calls with password issues…typical.
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Categories
Applications Information Technology PowerShell PRTG Scripting

Monitor Exchange Transport Queue with PRTG

So if you don’t know about it or are looking for something, PRTG is a great and powerful network monitoring tool. I’d recommend checking it out. There’s a free trial and you can start getting details of your network in just a few short minutes thanks to their super easy setup and configuration. Now I’m not going to review PRTG because I’m sure there’s plenty of reviews already out there, but simply put they have built-in monitors/sensors that are preconfigured for what you want to monitor. Should these built-in sensors not be adequate, they have the custom external sensor. Basically, this custom sensor allows you to use your own application or script to return text or XML data back to PRTG to log and report on. That’s what this is about. A script that will monitor Exchange 2010’s transport queue and output the results to XML and set a warning based on the total count of emails in the queue. You can setup your own alerting of this sensor to email you when the “queue fills up”.
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Categories
Information Technology Operating Systems Tips, Tricks, & Tweaks Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows XP

Monitor File or Directory Changes with PowerShell and Email Changes

I had a need to monitor a file/directory for changes, or more specifically entries into an error log by an application. I wanted a trigger on file change using a PowerShell or some other script, since the application didn’t have alerting capabilities built in. I wanted a script to check read the log file and send an email when the file changes containing what was changed, or in this case what the error was. You can tweak the script to monitor a directory or specific file, and customize the email with the file name or more. Either way this is the basic script. Schedule a task in Task Scheduler (Windows 7) or Scheduled Tasks (Windows XP) to run at login for that specific user, and make sure it never terminates or times out. Set your application to run:
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Categories
Exchange Information Technology Servers

PowerShell script to Identify Delays or Failures in Exchange Transport Queue and send Email

I wanted some transparency into the transport queue on Exchange 2010 mail servers to check or identify potential email failures or delays. Most of the time these are emails that were sent to “no-reply” addresses or typos in the recipient’s email address.
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Categories
Personal Right Now

Alfred’s First Swim

He’s going to need to practice more…. his paws were touching the sky!
Categories
Exchange Information Technology Servers Tips, Tricks, & Tweaks

Get Recursive Group Membership of Distribution Group (PowerShell)

I spent part of the day yesterday looking for a good way to dump members/users of a Distribution group. No big deal except this situation has many levels of nested groups. There’s a Quest (Dell) PowerShell snapin that will do this, but why install anything else on  a production server that doesn’t need to be there? I did, however, find an article for Exchange 2007 that did something like this, but when using it for 2010 it didn’t work for my needs. I just needed something simple that would work with Exchange 2010 and would run “out of box” on the server… Here’s what I came up with:
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Categories
Personal Right Now

The new vicious beast – Alfred the puppy…

Say hello to seven week old Alfred. He is a silver Weimaraner who shits, pees, and sleeps 24/7. More pics to come as he grows up!
Categories
Information Technology Tips, Tricks, & Tweaks XenServer

Create VDI Larger than 2TB XenApp 5.6 SP2 (5.6.102)

I’ve been setting up a new XenServer with a Mirrored 250GB volume, and a RAID 5 volume with three 2TB disks. The mirror is holding the virtual servers, and the Raid5 is to be used for snapshots and the file storage. I’ve looked for a few days now trying to find a solution to exceed the 2TB limit in the new XenServer and I finally found it here. Credit to Scott Bigliardi for this:
  1. Begin by finding the uuid of the SR:
  2. Get the volume group device name:
  3. Create the new logical volume, with a proper name:
    4. Change 3T to 4T or 5T (etc) to specify the size of your giant VDI
  4. Tell XenServer to scan the SR:

After scanning the SR, the new VDI magically appeared under the Storage tab for this SR in XenCenter.

I then gave it a name and description, and assigned it to a VM just like any other VDI.

Categories
Firefox Information Technology Tips, Tricks, & Tweaks

True Aero Firefox – Make it transparent!

It’s all pretty easy… Just edit your userChrome.css file found under %appdata%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<your profile>\chrome to include the below. Of Course I have the All-in-One Side bar (which is awesome), and a few other add-ons which I will list later, but here you go, or download it HERE:
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