Polaris Anyone?
Posted by Sheen in Tech Stuff on June 21st, 2009
Do you use Google Analytics? Are you tired of having to login to Google to check how your site is performing? Would you rather have a funky tool on your desktop that gives you access to all your Google Analytics data, you are reading the right post.
Desktop Reporting have introduced a product called Polaris which does just this for you. If you have one website that you need to get info on, this product is completely free! Get Polaris here.
Active Directory Password Expiry Reminder Email
Posted by Sheen in Windows Scripting on June 19th, 2009
If you have managed an Active Directory installation that has a large number of users who connect to the network infrequently, you may have faced a problem where the user’s password expires when they are away from the network and possibly leaving them in a situation where they are not able to reset their password remotely.
I recently was in this situation and had to write a script to intimate users about an impending password expiry. Here is what the script does:
Exchange 2007 Recreate OWA folders
Posted by Sheen in Windows Server on June 18th, 2009
If you face an issue where OWA in Exchange 2007 stops working, there is a pretty cool powershell command you can run to recreate the OWA virtual directory. The following commands will get you going:
This command will list all the current virtual directories.
Get-OwaVirtualDirectory
This command will delete the “owa” virtual directory under the Default Web Site.
Remove-OwaVirtualDirectory -identity "owa (Default Web Site)"
This command will re-create the “owa” virtual directory under the Default Web Site.
New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OWAVersion "Exchange2007" -Name "owa (Default Web Site)"
When you run this command, if you get an error as follows, it is possible that IIS is set to work in the 32 bit mode and not the required 64 bit mode.
New-OwaVirtualDirectory : An error occurred while creating the IIS virtual directory ‘IIS://mailserver.somewhere.com/W3SVC/1/ROOT/owa’ on ‘mailserver’.
At line:1 char:24
+ New-OWAVirtualDirectory <<<< -OWAVersion "Exchange2007" -Name "owa" -Website "Default Web Site"
To make IIS work in the 64 bit mode, you need to run the following command:
cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0
Just in case you do not have the adsutil.vbs script in your adminscripts folder, you can download it from here.
Drop me a line to let me know if this post has helped you!
Diskpart.exe Warning when expanding drive
Posted by Sheen in Windows Server on May 19th, 2009
Recently when using diskpart.exe to expand a volume on a Windows Server 2000 SP4 machine, we got a warning "Deleting the primary partition has modified the partition number of the partition that contains your Windows 2000 system files. The old partition number was 2; the new partition number is 1."
We changed the boot.ini file from:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect
to:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect
On rebooting the server, the server refused to boot throwing an NT Kernel not found error.
How to fix it:
Get list of machines by OS type from Active Directory
Posted by Sheen in Windows Server on May 18th, 2009
Here is an easy way of getting a list of computers that have a particular OS type from Active Directory using DSQuery.
dsquery * domainroot -filter "(&(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows XP*))"
The command above would give you a list of all computers that have a Windows XP operating system. For Windows Servers, change the command as follows:
dsquery * domainroot -filter "(&(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Server*))"
The output of the commands above would look something like this:
samid
server1$
server2$
server3$
dsget succeeded
Note the ‘samid’ at the head and ‘dsget succeeded’ at the end and the ‘$’ at the end tail of every server name.
If you are like me, and you would like just get a nice clean output with only server names, you can run this command: