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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)
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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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