UVM Blogs

Microsoft KB 187498 describes the registry values that can be used to disable various security protocols. Disabling SSLv2 is as easy as

This does require a reboot to put into affect.

I administer a server VM with a lot of disks, and many of them are the same size. When I need to make changes to the system’s storage, I’m always nervous that I’m going to poke the wrong disk. I could trust that […]

It started with an alert from System Center Operations Manager about a failed scheduled task. Of course, the alert references a task name that looks like a SID.  Running schtasks /query show a few jobs with a […]

I have been working on a function to convert the output of NET SHARE commands into usable PowerShell objects. In the course of my work, I was storing the output of the command in a variable, which I later pass […]

This video of a presentation by Scott Chacon has helped me start to get my head around Git.

I’ve started experimenting with Git in my current PowerShell project, and I’m going to […]

I’m working on some storage issues with our file services, and DFS Namespace services may the the best solution. But I will need to be able to keep the permissions on the DFS folders with targets in sync with the […]

For the past eight month, I’ve been working with EMC and Microsoft to diagnose a problem. Several time a month, during the backup of our primary Windows 2008 R2 file server, all the VSS shadow copies get deleted […]

Recently, I wanted to provide a client with a list of groups that related to some work he was doing. I wanted the group names as well as their location with AD. Although I often use the ds* commands or excellent ADfind tool for this type of task, I had been working in PowerShell on another [...]

Recently, I wanted to provide a client with a list of groups that related to some work he was doing. I wanted the group names as well as their location with AD. Although I often use the ds* commands or excellent <a href="http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/adfind/index.htm&quot; […]

In my discussion and demo at the IT-Discuss Live – Security event in May, I used a short slide deck to describe—in broad terms—how PGP Whole Disk Encryption works. This laid the foundation for working through some […]

I really like the newer event log model on Windows 2008 family, and the flexibility of the XML events and the queries that makes possible.
Recently, I started noticing a quiet failure of a scheduled task. The […]

Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without.

There are some things that we can’t really do without. But good old Yankee thrift pains me every time I have to replace printer consumables. I have a <a…[Read more]

We use EMC NetWorker for our enterprise backup solution. Since we migrated our primary file server from a NetApp filer to a native Windows server, we’ve been having a recurring problem with all the Shadow Copies […]

Amid the praise for and complaints about the newer version of webmail, we received a plea from a netbook user. She pointed out that the new layout made it very difficult to navigate among her mail folders. I use a […]

I’ve been working on a script to generate an informative message to users when they exceed quota thresholds on our file server. The features of the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) provides a variety of useful […]

Experimenting with querying WMI from Perl with Win32::OLE, I ran across the following WMI query options in an Perl example from Microsoft’s Script Center: After some digging, I found the following explanation of […]

I spent a some time configuring the Eventlog-to-Syslog service on my domain controllers, yesterday. A bunch of that time was spent trying to figure out why the service wasn’t able to read the config file I had […]

After seven years of providing robust file service hosted on a NetApp filer, we’ve decided to migrate our services to native Windows File Services. We have encountered several issues with the interaction of newer […]

I will be watching this; 9 pm on Monday, April 25th on most PBS stations. Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

I’ve received several phishing attempts, recently, this time masquerading as mail from Twitter. I thought I’d share how I recognized this as an attack. Many list members already know this stuff, but I thought I’d […]

It’s one of the first questions that we ask clients when we’re helping diagnose a problem with a network resource. There are several different ways to determine your IP address. There’s even a website, <a href="http://www.whatsmyip.org/&quot; […]

The situation: I’m working in Oracle Calendar as a person’s designate, managing his calendar on his behalf. We’ll call him Sam. I create a meeting for Sam with some other attendees. Later, I remove Sam from the […]

Recently, I was asked to talk with our Help Line staff about strategies for troubleshooting problems with Microsoft Office. I spent some time addressing the activation issues relating specifically Office 2010, […]

Microsoft Office 2010 and 2013 volume license editions use the Volume License 2.0 mechanism to manage activation. Office 2010 and 2013 will activate against our campus Key Management Service (KMS), without user […]

Update: better yet, read about the -Join and -Split PowerShell operators. Live and learn. —Geoff

Something I’ve found myself missing in PowerShell is a function to combing the elements of a list with a given […]

On Server 2008 and 2008 R2, if your Domain Controllers aren’t configured to require LDAP signing and disallow simple LDAP binds in plaintext, Active Directory Domain Services logs a warning event on startup, and <a […]

I’m upgrading the components of the user provisioning system I built. Previously, I used ActiveState Perl and the UWinnipeg PPM repository to get the Net::LDAPS stack working. This time, though, I decided I […]

I’ve been working on deploying a load-balanced Remote Desktop Gateway service. I deployed the first farm member, then cloned it to create a second member. The second member was throwing Error events, which has the […]

[contains some adult language : f-word]

We use BIND for our DNS, and allow certain systems to perform dynamic DNS registration. This arrangement has worked well for years. When I started deploying Server 2008 R2, I noticed that they weren’t registering […]

We use BIND for our DNS, and allow certain systems to perform dynamic DNS registration. This arrangement has worked well for years. When I started deploying Server 2008 R2, I noticed that they weren’t registering PTR records. At the same time, I noticed a bunch of errors that seemed to indicate that Dynamic DNS wasn’t working at [...]

Since we don’t use DHCP in our server subnets, I frequently have to locate free IP addresses when deploying a server. I remembered reading a TechNet Magazine article by Don Jones that used the PowerShell PROCESS […]

I’m in the process of deploying a couple new Server 2008 R2 domain controllers. I’m using two IBM blades, each having a pair of Broadcom NICs that I configured in fault-tolerance teams. In trying to verify the […]

I’m working with Microsoft to identify a problem I’m seeing with LSASS, possibly related to the VSS snapshot created by our backup software. At this point, I need to be able to capture the memory state on the […]