Whilst searching for a SQL Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide I stumbled across this link http://bit.ly/A8nQsI (69MB zip file) which allows you to download 92 current (and some past) IPD guides in one fell swoop. Really handy to keep hold of as a point of reference whether you’re a multi-skilled consultant or internal sys admin, these…
As in one of my previous blog posts I re-visited the CIS website today and was very pleased to find that they had published hardening guides for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. These really are great guides which in my mind should be in every IT department and at least reviewed as a baseline policy for your…
So here’s the scenario, you’ve been told that there are machines showing a network adapter with an exclamation and error in windows device manager. The task is to get a list of the machines using ConfigMgr 2012 which are affected by this and then you can work on narrowing down the problem. It may be…
In order to get the most out of your Microsoft System Center 2012 investment you’ll no doubt want to get the Asset Intelligence features of Configuration Manager (SCCM) working. You can add your Microsoft Volume licensing statement into SCCM but what if you want to add in non-Microsoft licences? Now I’m making an assumption here…
So if you are using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and want to add your machines into different OU’s depending on whether they are laptops or desktops there are many ways you can do it. Probably the easiest way is to use MDT integration and then add a task sequence step condition to use…
If you ever find yourself in the position whereby you need to enforce a machine to use a particular KMS server or port then read on. Equally if you have a machine that doesn’t seem to read the KMS server _vlmcs srv records from DNS then check this. If you browse the registry with regedit…
Today Microsoft released the first update roll-up for the System Center 2012 SP1 suite. A pretty quick release from Microsoft seeing as SP1 isn’t yet available to Joe Public and the whole System Center 2012 suite hasn’t been available for a year yet. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2785682 I think this shows 2 things from Microsoft: There are still a number…
It’s been a little while since I added a new post so I thought I would add some details of what’s current for me. Working for a retail based company with several websites, we have to comply to PCI-DSS requirements. This essentially means we have to structure our network and servers in a ‘secure’ manner,…
Need to take a copy of multiple mailboxes? I’ve had to do this in the past for various reasons such as audit/investigations etc. You’ll need to create a .csv file with the list of mailboxes you want to export. Then save the script below in a .ps1 file and store it in the same location…
Another one of those things that you might use once in a blue moon. I had to retrieve a list of all smtp addresses from our Exchange 2007 environment for validation. We had multiple smtp addresses for each recipient so this could have been quite a daunting task but is actually straight forward. Here’s the powershell……
More than patches 