Category Archives: System Administration

Cleaning up old DNS NS records in an Active Directory forest

Cleaning up old DNS NS records in an Active Directory forest, needed some powershell to help remove all the old DNS server names from various domains that have been removed from the forest over time or demoted / decommissioned.

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Dump all Distribution Groups -Exchange Server Powershell

Getting the members of each distribution group into a CSV file on an exchange server is easy using powershell. This will create one CSV file per group.

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Exchange server message tracking logs – examine them using powershell and excel

The Exchange server interface for examining message tracking logs forces you to put in one mailbox to search before you can do anything else. If you need to find emails sent from one outside person to groups of users or … Continue reading

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Moving (copying) a VM between standalone ESX hosts. – using ovftool

Download ovftool from VMware (https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=OVFTOOL430UPDATE3) For example copy a machine called jetfun from host – esxhost1 to esxhost2 – replace the new with the new hosts “vm network” overwrite any machine with the same name there place the new machine … Continue reading

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Saving passwords for use in powershell scripts.

the get-credential command gets a username/password pair interactively. these can be created and saved to a file, making this file a secure document means that only the user who created it can use it. this means if you want to … Continue reading

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Robocopy Scripts with logging.

Always struggle to remember this so put it here: Point is to create logfile with todays date in the name so we get a new file each day echo on for /F “tokens=1-6 delims=/ ” %%A in (‘date /t’) do … Continue reading

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Azure VMs to improve performance between sites.

Had a problem where the network access from a site in Africa to an Australian (Azure) based web site was very slow. Instead created IPSEC links to a virtual Fortigate appliance in azure which was in a “close” geographic site … Continue reading

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VMWARE – esx standalone create new machines

Script to copy one VM and create new ones that are “similar” <code> newvm=PV009 cd /vmfs/volumes/p9-storage mkdir $newvm cd $newvm cat ../PV004/PV004.vmx | sed “s/PV004/$newvm/g” | grep -v uuid > $newvm.vmx vmkfstools -d thin -c 128g $newvm.vmdk id=`vim-cmd solo/registervm /vmfs/volumes/p9-storage/$newvm/$newvm.vmx` … Continue reading

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Windows 10 and VPN connections.

Update coming but a lot of this has been fixed in windows 10 creator update But the other issue where it tries to use the vpn username for all credentials after connecting isnt fixed. no matter which vpn you choose … Continue reading

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Powershell mailboxexportrequest creation and management.

To minimise impact on the server do mailboxexportrequests one at a time and move the completed PST files to a final location as each one is created. # csv containing alias for each mailbox $a = import-csv exports.csv foreach ( … Continue reading

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