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.
Category: Information Technology
…Windows, Exchange, PowerShell, Batch, Servers, etc
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”.
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:
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.
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:
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:
- Begin by finding the uuid of the SR:
- Get the volume group device name:
- Create the new logical volume, with a proper name:
- Tell XenServer to scan the SR:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | root@xen1~]# <strong><span style="color: #0000ff;">xe sr-list</span></strong> uuid ( RO) : b55e5f09-8fef-4b5d-8dae-9410d630f205 name-label ( RW): SATA_7.2K 20T name-description ( RW): Hardware HBA SR host ( RO): type ( RO): lvmohba content-type ( RO): |
1 2 | root@xen1 ~]# <strong><span style="color: #0000ff;">vgs | awk '{print $1}' | grep b55e5f09-8fef-4b5d-8dae-9410d630f205</span></strong> VG_XenStorage-b55e5f09-8fef-4b5d-8dae-9410d630f205 |
1 2 | root@xen1 ~]# <strong><span style="color: #0000ff;">lvcreate -L3T -n"LV-"$(uuidgen) VG_XenStorage-b55e5f09-8fef-4b5d-8dae-9410d630f205</span></strong> Logical volume "LV-4e3da1e4-9e1a-4e12-96a1-d3c233efc0d5" created |
1 | root@xen1 ~]# <span style="color: #0000ff;"><strong>xe sr-scan uuid=b55e5f09-8fef-4b5d-8dae-9410d630f205</strong></span> |
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.
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: Finally! Just sign into your Google Account, access the Account Management page, and then look for Multiple sign-in under Personal Settings. Click Change, then follow the prompts. Sign Into Multiple Google Accounts Simultaneously
My Frequently Used Screen Savers:
This has to be one of the coolest PC’s I’ve ever built.
We were given the task to build the fastest PC for Video editing and rendering, with the most storage space we could fit, all without becoming a heater or jet engine for the user sitting in a cubical. The system had to be fault tolerant, so one OS hard drive could die and/or one drive from the RAID 5 array could die and still function. If the case could hold more drives I would have devoted another drive or two for a hot spare.