Most Administrators know that you can use a GPO to disable the ability to use USB storage devices on Windows computers. So you look up the instructions and implement the policy, but how do you know if it’s working? I’m sure you made a test OU while you were working out the best option for […]
As an employee of an MSP, I am often tossed into the ring, so to speak. I’ve found that configuring Microsoft’s tools to see all of the virtual machines in a clustered Hyper-V environment consumes too much time in high-pressure situations. Depending on the version of Windows the hosts are running, you may not see […]
Recently I was tasked with helping a company build out a solution for remote training classes. We chose Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services as the platform. I needed to develop a method to create bulk accounts for the students and place those accounts into the AD security group that granted access to the remote app. Most […]
Recentley, I needed to set a new password for Office 365 users in bulk without Azure AD Connect. I needed to be sure that I didn’t give service accounts new passwords. In addition, this was for a multi-state organization and we wanted to set the new passwords one city at a time. I was able […]
Recently I needed to reduce the licenses we were consuming with a particular cloud service. I was told that a couple of Active Directory groups served as the service’s ACL. All the accounts in question were disabled but the disabled status didn’t synchronize to the cloud service provider. I needed to remove all disabled user […]
Do you need to know the last time a user logged on, or who created an AD account? As long as you have audit logging enabled, the data you are after is in the event logs of your domain controllers. The problem is, if you have more than one domain controller (you should) the record […]
As and Exchange Architect, I often get asked to report on who belongs to a particular distribution list. It is easy enough to open Outlook or ADUC and find the DL group and view the DL members. If your organization has Skype for Business you can also use it to view the membership of a […]
I was recently asked what tool would be best to report the number of items in, and the size of, every folder in a particular file share. As an IT Architect I have numerous tools at my disposal that would be able to acquire the data my business partner needed. A few lines of PowerShell […]
We’re going to make another series of scripts that call our scanning tools with the lists we’ve made as input parameters and the folders we’ve made as output paths. Then, we’ll schedule our calling scripts as automated tasks that run every few minutes and wallah, a full system monitoring tool is born.
If you’ve been following this series then you know that we’re on a mission to create a poor man’s monitoring system from just PowerShell scripts and a web hosting engine. So far we’ve created HTML pages that show the warnings and errors from a group of server’s event logs. We’ve also made a report that […]
