Brad Rutkowski's Blog : Party in the back

Caught the Powershell Bug.

Brad Rutkowski — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:35:43 GMT

Over the past few months I have fallen in love with PowerShell. I’ve taken on a new role (starting in mid-October) that will be more focused on automating out administrative tasks via powershell so the focus of this blog might change more towards that subject. I think the crowd that congregates here are IT admins for the most part, so this should remain relevant to your jobs (did this blog have a focus anyways?). If you have a scripting question, drop me a mail and I’ll post about it later.

This is where I started, its a self paced course on the basics. Once you walk through this (2 hours) you’ll start seeing the power: http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/7/1/47104ec6-410d-4492-890b-2a34900c9df2/Workshops-EN.zip

Obligatory powershell jpg:

What do you say you DO here?

Brad Rutkowski — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 22:21:10 GMT

Just noticed the AD jigsaw poster has been updated for 2k8. So next time your boss asks you "What do say you do here?", don't reply with I'm a people person! Do the following:

1) Download one of the jigsaw posters from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c2b9e44e-0bbd-47cb-bc09-b3d48be7f867&DisplayLang=en

2) Print out on plotter

3) Give to boss

4) Ask for raise

We used to have one of these hanging outside our office, and as the rotating bosses would come by to see what we did, we'd just point them to the poster. Wonder where that thing is now...

Technorati tags: Active Directory, Windows 2008

XBOX 360 price drop

Brad Rutkowski — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 07:57:00 GMT

Technorati tags: XBOX

If you haven't got an XBOX 360 yet maybe now you'll reconsider, or have new ammo for the battle with your significant other. It looks like Microsoft just announced a significant price drop. Price changes which are up to $50 start on August 8th.

Enjoy.

Identity and Access in Windows Server 2008

Brad Rutkowski — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:29:14 GMT

Want to know what is changing or what's new in the Active Directory space from Win2k8? Then follow this link.

I have to say that I am quite pleased with the Beta3 build that we are running in production (6001.16510). There have been no "show-stoppers" to date since we've started deploying which is a nice change to past operating systems we've rolled out during our dogfooding cycles. We've ran into some minor bugs that we've filed and fixed post-beta3 but all in all these machines are quite stable and running efficiently.

We have quite a few RODCs in production currently at Microsoft, some of those are running on server core others are on full server. We have a mix of x86 and x64 running in production also. AD as a service has been running without issue. Replication with 2k3 DCs, authentication, LDAP, etc have worked with little fanfare. Like I said we're running into some minor OS issues which were working on (that's why we do this), but I'm pretty impressed with the work that the product group has done on Win2k8.

Any horror stories out in the field with LH B3? Any bugs that are frustrating you with this build? Drop me an e-mail or post a comment and I'll check to see if we're handling your issue internally (as time permits).

Technorati tags: active Directory, Longhorn, Windows Server 2008

What variations of sleep does my computer support? And why did it wake up?

Brad Rutkowski — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:37:00 GMT

POWERCFG has the answer to that question and many others, like -LASTWAKE will tell you why your machine resumed form sleep or hibernate. I used to run into an issue where I'd wake up in the morning and find my laptop was at perfect temperature to cook an egg, used -LASTWAKE to find out why...

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -AVAILABLESLEEPSTATES
The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby ( S3 ) Hibernate Hybrid Sleep
The following sleep states are not available on this system:
Standby (S1)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
Standby (S2)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -LASTWAKE
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
Wake Source Count - 0

UPDATE:

The LASTWAKE info I supplied above wasn’t too helpful. LASTWAKE is dependent on your hardware and drivers and not all support this functionality yet and so you'll get either reports where it is too general (USBHUB) or nothing at all as you see above.

Here is what it looks like when your hardware and drivers support this functionality. Tracking what woke the system is new for Vista, so it's going to take some time for firmware, hardware and drivers to catch up.

C:\Debuggers>powercfg -LASTWAKE
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
Wake Source Count - 1
Wake Source [0]
    Type: Device
    Instance Path: ACPI\PNP0C0C\2&daba3ff&1
    Friendly Name:
    Description: ACPI Power Button
    Manufacturer: (Standard system devices)

NLTEST returning RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF

Brad Rutkowski — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:33:09 GMT

Ran into a case today where NLTEST was returning RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF.

C:\Users\Administrator>nltest /sc_query:bradforest
I_NetLogonControl failed: Status = 1717 0x6b5 RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF

C:\Users\Administrator>nltest /sc_reset:bradforest
I_NetLogonControl failed: Status = 1717 0x6b5 RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF

I cranked up netlogon logging but nothing appeared in the log which was strange. I then checked the windows services that were running on the system and noticed that netlogon was stopped and set to manual.

That would explain it!

16 things it takes most people 50 years to learn.

Brad Rutkowski — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:30:13 GMT

Things It Takes Most Of Us 50 years to learn:

1. The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.

2. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.

3. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

4. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.

5. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is: age 11.

6. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

7. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."

9. The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.

10. If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too.

11. You should not confuse your career with your life.

12. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter/janitor, is not a nice person.

13. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

14. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

15. Your true friends love you, anyway.

16. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

Saw this cruising scribD (proclaimed ot be the yotube of documents) and saw this...

del.icio.us tags: funny, humor, learn

Vista Wallpapers...

Brad Rutkowski — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 03:19:13 GMT

http://www.hamaddarwish.com/content/index.html

If you like the cool filters used in some of the vista backgrounds there are others available for high-res download.

Excerpt: Below, is a photo collection of the images taken during Microsoft's Windows Vista photo-shoot. Two of which are currently shipped in the Vista installation disk, while the rest did not make the cut into Vista's Wallpaper Collection

Making your app prompt for elevation in Windows Vista

Brad Rutkowski — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:27:00 GMT

You find yourself in a situation where you may want your app to run with privileges. In this case you want the app the prompt for elevation when its started. You could have the user just alt-click and runas administrator or you can put it in the manifest.

Short answer:

</requestedPrivileges>

</security>

Long answer:

From http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480150.aspx

Technorati tags: vista, elevation, privileges

Searching for Vista drivers?

Brad Rutkowski — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:29:38 GMT

This is a nice consolidated location for a lot of Vista drivers. Of course I make no guarantees if you install them. This page just has links to the pages from the manufacturer so you don't need to run around the entire interweb.

http://www.radarsync.com/vista/

Great Art

Brad Rutkowski — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:56:00 GMT

If you haven't checked out https://www.zune-arts.net yet then you're missing out on some really cool art, music, videos that are free for the taking. I've put a sample here but there are quite a bit on the site that you should check out. Some of my favoirte...(read more)

Book of Vista (The definitive guide to Vista)

Brad Rutkowski — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 20:18:42 GMT

I've lately been sending people to Wikipedia for information on what's new in Windows Vista, but with the release of the Product Guide on microsoft.com I'll be sending them to this download location now. A comprehensive feature-by-feature guide to Windows...(read more)

How to filter the eventlog in Vista manually (XML)

Brad Rutkowski — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 02:37:25 GMT

So I ran into a situation last week where I wanted to filter the event log in Vista to only show events in the Application log that contained the string msnmsgr.exe. Alas, this was not as easy as alt-clicking and adding to the keywords. I thought it would...(read more)

Windows Live Search for Mobile launched!

Brad Rutkowski — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 03:22:00 GMT

So Windows Live search for Mobile launched and Gizmodo did a comparison between Google maps for mobile and Live search for mobile and said that the Live search wins hands down!

Take the jump to read the comparison, but after reading it I have to say I was quite impressed.

-B

Why is Vista such a memory hog?

Brad Rutkowski — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 17:08:55 GMT

It's not.

So I have been hearing this a lot lately and wanted to get a link out to a good article which explains superfetch and what it is doing. I will have to admit the first time that I opened task manager in Vista and saw my system running at ~1.6GBs I thought I had a memory leak of some sort, but once I determined this not to be the case I was perplexed. Where is all the RAM in my system going? Is Vista really that bloated?

Well perception is everything (or a lot), so I wanted to point out this article which does a good job of summarizing Vista and the use of "superfetch".

It turns out that Vista is not bloatware, but in essence is caching items that it thinks I am going to use in memory, henceforth making effective use of the RAM I have in my system.

Technorati tags: Vista Tips, Vista, Windows