I needed to add a group of users to the ACL of all our printers. As we currently have about 100 printers; I looked if I could use powershell for this. Currently on Windows server 2008 there are no built in cmdlets to administrate printers. But I did find a useful powershell script with everything I needed. I ended up …

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On our teminal server 2008 farm we had some serious problems the last couple of days. Whenever users tried to login they got a “Access Denied” error. Only administrator accounts were able to log in. Additionally the eventlog, the McAfee services and some other services weren’t started automatically. …

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One of my colleagues gave me a list of AD groups for the sharepoint environment he’s confguring. Instead of creating them manually I used the Quest ActiveRoles management shell. 1import-csv 'SecurityGroups.csv' | foreach { 2New-QADGroup -Parent \$\_.ParentContainer -Name \$\_.Name -sAM 3\$\_.Name …

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Recently I needed to create tens of DNS records. This little script automates the creation of DNS records. The scripts reads a csv file which contains the hostname and the according IP address. This information is used to launch dnscmd which creates the DNS records in the supplied DNS zone. 1 2$DnsServer = …

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Carter Shanklin announced the winners of the contest. 1st prize: The guest provisioning system of LucD. This application lets you provision your VMs in an easy way. You can set the options from one screen no clicking around to configure everything manually. 2nd prize: VI Power Documenter by tzamora. This script …

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Last week Netapp released there first SMVI release. SMVI integrates VMware snapshots and Netapp snapshots to take consistent backups. To do this SMVI takes VMware snapshots before taking a snapshot of the volume on the Netapp. Now you can backup your complete VMware infrastructure in seconds without putting any load on …

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Dmitri over at Dmitry’s PowerBlog just posted about the integration between PowerGui and the VI client. I had already installed the PowerGUI 1.5.1 version but hadn’t noticed the plugin for the VI Client. This makes managing your VMware environment using Powershell even more easier. PowerGUI lets you write your …

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I regularly need to administer EMC Clariion SANs for which Java JRE 1.4 is needed. Unfortunately some other websites/applications need a more recent Java version. Before I used a separate VM with an XP and Java 1.4 installed on it to administering clariions. This is some serious overkill and I was looking for a better …

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Last week VMware officially released the VI Toolkit for Windows. They replaced get-viserver with connect-viserver. get-viserver is now an alias for connect-viserver. disconnect-viserver was added which allows you to do a clean disconnect. Hence the rename of the get-viserver cmdlet. VMware also added cmdlets for …

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