Microsoft Server Best Practices Analyzer Scan Results

First off as an Englishman I hate the use of ‘z’ in this way… It should be analyser but Microsoft being a US company I suppose I can’t really complain. I recently reviewed the ‘Best Practices Analyzer’ (BPA) results on one of our servers and decided that a number of the results could be safely … Read more

Trend Micro Deep Security Remove Old Licenses

If you are running Trend Micro Deep Security you may at some point add a trial license to your management server. This is something we did to demonstrate functionality and help to build a business case. One problem you will encounter is once the key expires you will begin to receive alerts which you cannot … Read more

HP 3PAR Battery Status

We currently have an active alert for a failed battery on one of our 3PAR arrays. This shows up in the alerts (see previous post) screen however we may want to see additional information. Log onto the 3PAR via your SSH client of choice and execute the command showbattery 3PAR01 cli% showbattery Node PS Bat … Read more

List Windows Server Roles and Features with PowerShell

I’m sure for anyone who administers Microsoft Windows Server the Server Manager console is an all too familiar place. It does make it easy to add/remove roles and features however PowerShell is another great option that can really speed things up at times. So – what can we do with PowerShell to list the roles and … Read more

Recycle IIS App Pools

We have a system which regularly requires the IIS app pools to be recycled, I haven’t yet gotten round to writing this in PowerShell or scripting with some form of orchestration software. For now it’s just a good old batch script. I’m going to remove most of the script and just leave the important lines … Read more

WSUS – DMZ Server

I have a virtual machine in a DMZ which is not part of my Active Directory domain however I want to configure it to point at my internal Windows Server Update Services VM (WSUS) server for patching. If it had been in AD I would have deployed a GPO however that not being an option I … Read more

ESXi NTP PowerShell Script

I wanted a quick way to configure NTP settings on a number of VMware ESXi hosts across two datacenters. Hosts in site A should point to the NTP source locally primarily and to site B NTP as a secondary source and vice versa for hosts in site B. The following isn’t perfect and a lot … Read more

Egress Switch – Large File Repository Cleanup

For sending encrypted e-mails and large files to external parties I use Egress Switch which we have deployed internally rather than using the cloud service. I like the product and it’s ease of use and functionality but that’s not what I want to talk about in this post. If you have deployed this product yourself with the … Read more