NetworkSydney

Hey! check out this cool new free remote desktop manager from Microsoft!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4603c621-6de7-4ccb-9f51-d53dc7e48047

Here is a quick one line powershell command to spit out the Location (port, bus, scsi target id, lun id), size (in GB) and Device ID (also known as disk number in the windows gui) into a file.

Get-WmiObject Win32_DiskDrive | select-object DeviceID,{$_.size/1024/1024/1024},scsiport,scsibus,scsitargetid,scsilogicalunit | out-file -FilePath c:\output.txt

Note: This command is one line, watchout for wordwrap!

Hi Y’all, Just a quick entry for list the IP, MAC and Description fields of the NIC that are IP enabled on a system using Powershell. Might be handy for when the network team asks for MAC addresses to trace ports.

Get-WMIObject Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | where{$_.IPEnabled -eq “TRUE”} | Select-Object MACAddress,caption,description,IPAddress

Note: This command is all on one line, so beware of the word wrapping.

Update: this one is little better, it gets the network connection name as seen by Network Connections Window

Get-WmiObject win32_networkadapter | where {$_.physicaladapter -eq $true} | Select-Object macaddress,netconnectionid

Hi All,

Finally got around to installing Windows 7 onto some old piece of hardware. Overall, the experience went quite well with things such as RAID controller drivers already included and not needing to supply drivers. I installed the 64x bit version and it seems to run well on my old Athlon 64. The graphics are onboard so video isn’t the best especially on a 24″ Dell wide monitor. The sound controller is giving me a headache, Windows Update found the drivers for the onboard sound controller but is refusing to cooperate, it seems confused thinking that I only have rear speakers in a 5.1 configuration. I think I might just do without it for a now and get a cheapy Sound Blaster card later on.

Software wise it seems to be good overally, I still think however Microsoft just shuffled icons around and repackaged it. So far I have received a few popups regarding the application compatibility thing which might get annoying down the track. Apart from that I think I might keep using it and see how things go.

Ciao!

If you found regmon and filemon useful well wait till you see Process Monitor. It is regmon and filemon blended together then put on steroids to include network mon and a whole heap of othe stuff, all driven by the simple filtering options. Download from Microsoft today and take a look, I am sure I will need it in the future.

Just noticed that it is possible to extend the boot partition on a Windows 2008 R1 server without the need to use a boot disk. Although I tried this on a physical x64 server, I assume it will work on a x86 and virtual machines as well. The same process applies with the use of Diskpart, selecting the volume and entering the extend command.

Cool!

Here is a quick tip on how to find a WMI Class using powershell based on a keyword

get-wmiobject -list | select-string “keyword”

It seems VMware ESX 3.x does not support virtual IDE hard drives. So when converting physical machines or workstation images that are configured with IDE hard drives you may be greeted with a 0×07B blue screen. There is a fair bit of material out there, but I thought it might be valuable to provide my perspective as well.

Simply put, I replaced the atapi,sys file with the symmpi.sys file found on another virtual machine. Once this was done I was able to boot into the operating system in this case Windows 2003. Windows then automatically reconfigured itself and requested to reboot. After rebooting, I noticed the CD Rom drive was not configured, then I realised why the atapi.sys file had to be put back. Replacing the atapi.sys file with the original file followed by rebooting allowed me to see the CD Rom drive. I was then able to install vmware tools.

Note: although I downloaded vmscsi.sys and installed it, I am not sure that it was required. This file can be found in the vmscsi floppy image obtainable from VMware.

Just a quick post regarding the registry keys needed to have clients (Windows 2003 Servers) to use a particular WSUS server. The keys below need to be set to your WSUS server, we use 8530 which may or may not be the case for you.

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\windows\WindowsUpdate\WUServer (http://servername:8530)
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\windows\WindowsUpdate\WUStatusServer (http://servername:8530)

Sometimes I think the hardest part about IT is understanding product Licensing. In this case I am talking about Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Initially I had the understanding that of Microsoft SQL Server was not cost effective on a virtual machine with Per Processor licensing. This is no longer the case as I recently reviewed Microsoft Licensing documents to state otherwise. The key point I took out of the document was that Microsoft SQL Server licensing was no different between virtual or physical environments. This now increases the use case scenario to host any database that does not require more than 4 VCPU’s (VMware Hypervisor). My understanding, is that Microsoft will allow you to assign as many virtual CPU’s as the number of cores on a single socket.

Once I dig out the document link I will post it.

Update: link to multicore licensing article http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx