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Good day!
Today I will look at the basics of System Protection and how to monitor and/or manage it through Powershell, either remote or locally. For this, we have multiple Powershell commands and ways to use those commands. Let us look at a few options!
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Good day! Today, another small one. At times, you will have a certain process, service or software package that during faulty periods takes take up a lot of memory. To counter this, we can have a script take automatic remedial actions.  Good day,
Another quick Powershell script. Even though it is already 2020, there are still enough servers with older disks capable of slowing down because of fragmentation. So, how can we make sure we stay up to date on the fragmentation? Good day!
Because of a few vacation days, it has been a while since the last post. Today I want to bring you a Powershell script, or at least the base, that allows for automatic and randomized restores using the Veeam Backup and Replication software. Now the question would be, why would I want an automated randomized restore? Good day!
Hopefully, everyone is having a good start of their 2020! Time to continue that good start with more troubleshooting. This time I will list some common problems and mistakes that you can encounter within a Kaspersky Security Center. So let’s start by listing some issues and mistakes I have seen and/or encountered within Kaspersky Security Center. Good day and a Merry Christmas to everyone! Lately there have been a good few holidays so not enough time to keep the flow of content high. I have a bigger script regarding automating Veeam Restores, and the testing of it, in the pipeline so better get ready for that one in 2020. Today there will only be a very quick and basic one. How can we use CMD to remotely/GPO-wise turn off “Fast Start-up”?  Good day!
Lately I have been having more issues regarding deploying software that depends on scheduled tasks it should create itself/would have to be manually created. Most of the time we do not want to have to manually create scheduled tasks and the software itself won't always create scheduled tasks when deployed/installed remotely. So we have to create the scheduled tasks ourselves! And what better way to do it than using Powershell? Good day!
It has been a while, but more posts will come soon. For now, an easier one that has more informational value than any actual use. Ever felt like you wanted to know how old the workstation is of a customer? Or how long that old physical server has been standing there? Now you might be able to figure that out using Powershell. Good day!
Some have already seen this error before while others are confused by it appearing when running their script. I am talking about an error occurring when using the Webclient object in Powershell to download or upload files. To be specific ... this one: An exception occurred during a WebClient request. Good day,
A small one this time. Whether it is Azure servers, customer servers or workstations ... there can be many reasons why a device can not be running 24/7 and reboots need to happen. As an example, Azure servers that have been set to turn off after work hours and turn on in the morning. To realize this, you must have set rules or other automation tools to have it shut down and start up again. However, can you trust on it always working? Maybe the server has been online for the last few weeks without you noticing! The script below checks how long a device has been active for and executes actions depending on the result.  Good day,
Today I wanted to mix it up a bit more and combine both the informational posts with scripting. And thus for people who are new to Powershell ... the basics! Disclaimer. This will not teach you HOW to script and/or most of the scripting language, there are more than enough good quality tutorial video's and reference material on that. This will simply be a small lesson on how Powershell is set up to work and some tips/tricks that might help you create your first working scripts. After this session you hopefully will be able to see the idea behind the logo shown at the top of this blog post. Good day! Today no script but a small informative post explaining the bare bone basics of SNMP. Anyone with any knowledge about SNMP will have no use for this information so this really will be more of an introduction into this subject. So.. What is SNMP?  Good day!
Today I will be taking a look at a way of gathering basic information on HPE iLO's from the physical servers themselves. Whether you work on servers remote or locally, the iLO (HPE Integrated Lights Out) is an important part of the extra security you have to make sure that you can manage the device regardless of whether it is on or off and allows for quick access to the health of the device. Sometimes however, you are either logged in on the device and need some quick information or you are running scripts remotely on multiple servers to retrieve specific information. There is an easy way to get some basic knowledge without having to log in to the iLO or even have to find the iLO. Good evening again!
This time I am back with quite an easy one. The scenario. Users are logged in on their workstation/server and you need to know which group policies they are getting loaded in (either computer or user)! (Assuming there is a reason for doubt on whether or not they are getting the correct ones from the domain GPO) Another good day to you! This time I want to talk about an error we will see more and more if the move towards cloud will keep going as steady as it is now. Azure has options called Automation scripts. These can be used to execute scripts over the Azure platform (within the customers confinements) to different end. Examples of these are scripts that automatically shut down or start up VM's at specific times. If you make use of these Automation scripts however, you will notice (mostly after a year) that they might suddenly just stop working. When looking in the job however you will find an error trying to call out an account with the message that the key and/or thumbprint are expired. (All upcoming images will have some white squares due to me having to white out certain numbers/names)  Good evening! (ow my, it is already dark outside)
Hereby a batch script that I have running on a good batch of devices on a weekly base. While this one should technically also work on separate Office 2016 and Office 2019 installations, I have so far only extensively tested on installations of Office365 installations. What does the script do? Well, it is quite easy. Office has a registry key that determines at what rate it receives updates and which updates it receives. First thing the script does is check whether this registry exists. If it does not exist, it will stop the script and not do anything at all. Good day!
This time a niche script for those customers that use terminal/remote desktop servers with User Profile Disks. For people unsure about what User Profile Disks (UPD's) are. They are profile folders located on for example a file server that get loaded onto a terminal server the moment the user it belongs to logs in. These contain the user-data files (documents, appdata etc. etc.). This saves space and allows you to easier set limits to how big their profile is allowed to be. However .. problems can arise at times and if a UPD gets stuck on one of the terminal servers while the user gets directed to a different one (giving that employee constant temporary profiles) it can get annoying real quick to find out where it is stuck (as usually the best way is to manually disconnect the disk from the server), especially when you have multiple servers with 10+ users on it. And another!
Another script that can be used to make managing a bigger amount of workstations easier. Ever got annoyed by devices being installed remotely (or manually) by either yourself or software and it keeps going to hibernate? Or perhaps those few HP Surfaces that keep losing their internet connection because someone closes the lid and it goes into sleep-mode? Not anymore, at least if you manage to execute the script before the device falls asleep. Good day again!
This time I have a smaller and a lot easier script to share. Ever had clients ask to have their PC's checked for specific software (now and in the future) to make sure no one installs certain software packages? Well, I had and thus I created this Powershell script (which by the way, requires Powershell 3.0 or higher) that can check this for you. While it is best to combine this with remote monitoring software, GPO and/or other methods to remote have this run on multiple devices, I am sure there are more uses for it. So, what does this do? It simply gets the values under the Installation registry that contain the names of installed software (while not 100% foolproof against some sneakier installation packages, it does mostly retrieve all the installed software) and pastes those in a txt file next to the Powershell script (Can be adjusted). Good day!
Hereby a script that I have running over all customer workstations and servers on a daily base. Windows firewalls is important, no matter how annoying they can be sometimes to set up correctly for some applications, and it is almost always preferred to keep them active. Knowing customers, fellow IT-people and third-party support however they do have a tendency to "temporarily" turn off the firewall and don't always remember or want to turn it on again. To make sure that we have a full guarantee that Windows firewall is enabled everywhere, we run this script over all devices to give us that guarantee. While its not really a script that is useful for running manually on 1 device, it has good use when being run through GPO, remote monitoring software, task scheduler or similar methods. And another good day!
Lately I have been dabbling around with ESET Antivirus on workstations and servers while managing it through ESMC. ESET Antivirus has a ESET Firewall function, however due to a lot of customers having very specific rules and exceptions within their Windows Firewalls i turned that off for workstations. The fact also is that a lot of times, Antivirus firewalls either overtake or conflict with the Windows Firewall (Previous experiences with Kaspersky's Firewall). This luckily is very easy as it is simply turning 1 option off in the workstation policy. Good day again!
Network drives are commonly used in many companies. Whether they have a H: drive linking to their home drives or some other drive letters linking to specific shares on file servers .. these are commonly used ways of allowing people to access files that are saved on servers, storage devices or other remote places. These drive letters are usually spread around by different methods ranging from group policy, workstation management software or manually added by customers. However, some times something changes that requires the old shares to be removed due to being invalid or outdated. When you have customers with clusters of network drives of which some are new/correct and others are invalid, it can become annoying to manage. The script is quite simple and only has a niche usage, but can nonetheless be quite useful. Good day and welcome to the first of hopefully many blog posts whereby I mention some of the issues I run into while trying to gather experience regarding the world of IT and share solutions or workarounds I find as I go.
One of the earlier things I ran against (Mostly while performing remote background tasks) is changing current user registry's. The problem is that either the specific user/customer accounts on the servers/workstations don't have enough rights to change a registry or that remote software uses an administrator or SYSTEM account on which it has no use to change the current user registry. Therefor this Powershell script ended up saving me a few times. This can be used from either an Administrator account on the device itself or remotely using any RMM/MSP software. |
AuthorPatrick Berger AKA Powershellder. Categories
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