Matt Johnson's Technical Adventures

Quest’s AD cmdlets 1.2 are available.

win2kmaster — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:21:56 GMT

One of the cool cmdlets that was added is Get-QADMemberOf. I am excited to get playing with these.

More info can be found on Dmitry’s blog here.

You can download them here.

Link Clearance – 3/17/2009

win2kmaster — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:49:19 GMT

Log Parser and PowerShell

win2kmaster — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:51:47 GMT

David Muegge has a great set of blog posts going related to using Log Parser with PowerShell.

Check them out with the links below.

http://muegge.com/blog/?p=62 (Log Parser and PowerShell – Part I)
http://muegge.com/blog/?p=65 (Log Parser and PowerShell – Part II)

Freaking Hilarious

win2kmaster — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:13:13 GMT

The Simpsons still remain awesome to this day!

Random Collection of Links – 11/4/2008

win2kmaster — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:51:25 GMT

I refuse to post anything regarding the election, so here are some interesting (or may not so interesting) links.

Microsoft Essential Business Server on Technet

win2kmaster — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:29:54 GMT

Just logged into Technet today to get a ISO, and saw that EBS is now in Technet. Now only if I had enough machines to try it out with.

Get PC Serial Number via PowerShell

win2kmaster — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:04:00 GMT

This is a pretty cool one liner that is of tremendous help. You can get the serial number of most PCs via PowerShell remotely. This includes Dell service tags.

Command:

Get-WMIObject -Class "Win32_BIOS" -Computer computername | select SerialNumber

Example:

Get-WMIObject –Class “Win32_BIOS” –Computer MJDEV01 | Select SerialNumber

SerialNumber
------------

8888888

This works on both Dell and HP/Compaq PCs. I haven’t tested this on other vendors PCs.

Getting Mailbox Size for Multiple Users on Exchange 2007

win2kmaster — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:08:55 GMT

Recently, while doing a migration between Exchange 2007 servers, I needed to find out the size of the mailboxes so I could distribute the transfer load to off hours. PowerShell to the rescue.

There is a lot to this one liner, but you can customize it for your use.

Get-Content "c:\data\users-to-move.txt" | ForEach-Object {Get-Mailbox $_ | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select-Object DisplayName, {$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}}

Lets go into the details.

First, I started by creating a text file for the people I know I had to move. You can use Quest’s tools or Get-Mailbox to filter only those who you need to move. The text file was already created so I decided to use that. I used the Get-Content command. I used a file that was local on my workstation, but you can use a UNC path as well.

Once I got the content in the pipeline, I sent it to the ForEach-Object command. This causes PowerShell to loop through each line of the text file and send the contents in the $_ variable to what is inside the brackets. From there I sent it to Get-Mailbox so I can get the user's alias so I would be able to get the mailbox’s statistics. I am guessing that I could have just used Get-MailboxStatistics and piped in the user’s alias, but I had the email addresses.

From there, I only needed the name and total size of the mailbox for the user. I ran the Select statement to get only the two properties that I needed. The problem is that the value TotalItemSize is stored in bytes not megabytes or gigabytes. That is where having PowerShell built on top of .NET comes in handy. I just added to the end of the property that I wanted .Value.ToMB(). You will need to enclose those in brackets to make sure that it works. Another you can change the number that the TotalItemSize is ToGB().

I know this is kind of wordy, but it was useful to me and displays the power of PowerShell.

Interesting Links – 8/21/2008

win2kmaster — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:21:01 GMT

Windows 7 gets it’s first blog

win2kmaster — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:06:31 GMT

Jon DeVann and Steven Sinofsky started the Engineering Windows 7 Blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/default.aspx

This is awesome! Except, I am still just getting completely used to Vista for everything. Oh well.

Interesting Links – 8/14/2008

win2kmaster — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:04:59 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Available

win2kmaster — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:59:06 GMT

Visual Studio 2008

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Windows SBS 2008 Technical Library

win2kmaster — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:14:21 GMT

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 Technical Library is available on Technet.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc527559.aspx

Enjoy!

Interesting Links – 8/8/2008

win2kmaster — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:53:27 GMT

SQL Server 2008 Released to Technet

win2kmaster — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:33:10 GMT

I was downloading another ISO today, and realized that SQL Server 2008 was among the items you can download.

SQL Server 2008 Developer
SQL Server 2008 Web
SQL Server 2008 Workgroup
SQL Server 2008 Standard
SQL Server 2008 Enterprise

Cool!