In this article I will show you how to change/reset HP ILO password from Operating System without going to HP ILO console.

Quite often it happens that we forget ILO passwords. It also happens that person who changed ILO password is not available and the password is not stored anywhere. This is a tough situation if you want to manage the server remotely via ILO. HP has developed a tool called “HP ONLINE Configuration (HPONCFG)” using which you can access all ILO settings.

There are two versions of this tool.

1. Command line
2. GUI

You can get both of them by downloading and installing HPONCFG from HP site (http://www.hp.com/support/ilo2 ) for the operating system where you want to change ILO settings.

Once downloaded, go to the installation directory(generally C:\Program Files\HP\hponcfg\)  and launch hponcfg_gui.exe to launch the utility. Make sure to do it as administrator; otherwise it won’t work. After launching, go to “Users” tab and you know what to do from there.

Apart from changing/resetting ILO passwords for users, you can also manage various other settings of ILO from this UI. You can change ILO IP address, change DHCP options, change ILO DNS servers, etc.

If you already know the password and looking for a way to change the password remotely via some automation, then refer my previous article (Change HP ILO User Password using Powershell).

Hope this helps and happy learning.

It is simple. When you are at desktop screen, right click on the task bar, switch to navigation tab, and you will find the option (“Go to desktop instead of Start menu when I sign in”). Just check that box and click on OK.

It is very simple when you want to do it on a single computer. But how to deploy it to multiple workstations?. How to deploy it to all windows 8.1 computers in your office?

Any change in user environment is a change to file or registry. So, when you enable this option via task bar, the following registry value is set to ‘0’

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage\OpenAtLogon

(Courtesy:  www.grouppolicy.biz)

So, being a system administrator, you have to decide what is the best way to deploy this setting to all users. You can use group policy preferences, scheduled tasks or any other custom mechanisms that you use in your organization. My preference is Group policy preferences as it is very easy to configure.

I don’t want to explain how to configure GPP as someone already did that. See http://www.grouppolicy.biz/2013/06/how-to-configure-a-boot-to-desktop-group-policy-for-windows-8-1/ for detailed instructions.

I also came across an article from same which is explaining how to enable “Boot to Desktop” on Windows 8 computers as well. Basically they are using SendKeys functionality in Windows Forms to trigger the desktop access from Start Menu. They are doing it through powershell script configured as a logon script for users. See http://www.grouppolicy.biz/2013/05/how-to-enable-boot-to-desktop-group-policy-for-windows-8/ details.

Hope this helps and happy learning.

Who killed my process?

A tough question. It is very difficult to troubleshoot unexpected process terminations/exits. We don’t know what other process is causing my process to terminate. I am sure some of you have already faced this kind of problem. I came across a nice tool which can address this kind of situation.

Windows debugger(Windbg) has a utility called GFLAGS.EXE which can be used for monitoring a process exit. It has ability to tell us which process has terminated my process. It can monitor that and can give you a pop-up message when it happens. This simplifies the troubleshooting and helps catch the rogue process/application.

Apart from giving a System status message, it can write events to event log as well (check your application log). This also has facilities to dump process memory before exit.

Steps to enable process exit monitoring:

• Run GFLAGS.EXE and select the Silent Process Exit tab.
• Type the name of the process that is exiting unexpectedly.
• Hit the TAB key on the keyboard to refresh the GUI.
• Check the following boxes:
  • Enable Silent Exit Process Monitoring (This enables the feature and tracks silent process exits in the application event log. Event ID: 3001)
  • Enable Notification (This optionally creates a balloon popup with the same information in the event log.) 
  • Ignore Self Exits (This prevents superfluous logging when the application exits gracefully, such as when File / Exit is selected from a menu.)
•  Click OK to save the change and exit the GFLAGS tool.

 NOTE: The changes will take effect immediately for any new processes launched after the change.  A reboot is NOT required.

I came across this nice tip in ASKPERF blog(http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2013/05/01/what-killed-my-process.aspx). Go through that for complete information.

This is one of the good opportunities for Powershell learners. The Powershell inventor, Jeffrey Snover along with Jason Helmick is going to talk about Powershell v3 exclusively for IT administrators.

I hope you don’t want to miss this opportunity.

Course Outline

– Getting Started with PowerShell
– Don’t Fear the Shell
– The Help System & Getting Connected
– Extending the Shell
– Objects for the Admin
– The Pipeline: Deeper
– The Power in the Shell – Automation, Remoting, Scripting & Toolmaking

Link to Register for this event: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/PowerShell-JumpStart?CR_CC=200211917

In this post, I will show you how to disable the local area connections that are not in connected state in a Windows Server/Desktop. It is quite common scenario that our servers will have at least one or two Network adapters in disconnected state if don’t use all available network ports on the server. There is no harm in having them in such condition, but a few monitoring softwares like HP SMH treats this condition as error state. Moreover, it is not great to have disconnected network adapters on the server as this can lead to some sort of confusion when someone is debugging a problem on the server.

The following powershell code helps you to disable the network adapters that are in disconnected state on remote/local computers. The code uses a WMI class called Win32_NetworkAdapter which stores the details of each network connection in the windows server along with its status(connected/disconnected, etc). The status code 7 for a network adapter indicates that it is in “media disconnected state”.

CODE

function Disable-DisconnectedAdapter{            
[cmdletbinding()]            
param(            
[string[]]$ComputerName            
)            
foreach($Computer in $ComputerName) {            
Write-Host "Working on $Computer"            
if(Test-Connection -ComputerName $Computer -Count 1 -ErrorAction 0) {            
    try {            
        $nics = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_NetWorkAdapter -ComputerName $Computer -ErrorAction Stop | ? { $_.NetConnectionStatus -eq 7 }            
    } catch {            
        Write-Error "Failed to Query WMI class for network adapters on $Computer"            
        Continue            
    }            

    foreach($nic in $nics) {            
        try {            
            $retval = $nic.disable()            
            if($retval.returnvalue -eq 0) {             
                "{0} network card disabled successfully" -f $nic.Name            
            } else {            
                "{0} network card disable failed" -f $nic.Name            
            }            
        } catch {            
            "Error occurred while disabling {0}" -f $nic.Name            
            continue            
        }            
    }            

} else {            
    Write-Verbose "$Computer is offline"            
}            

}            
}

Test this code before you try in production environment.

System administrators depend a lot on WMI objects to query various information from local or remote computers. That means if any of the WMI query is taking long time or never ending, the automatons placed by System administrator may fail. I ran into same situation yesterday. Query against a WMI Class(given by third party application) is taking very long to execute and never ending. This is resulting in my scripts to halt at that computer for very long and not proceeding further. This is a big problem and I feel the automation should handle such cases as well. Otherwise you will be under impression that script is running fine(if you schedule it somewhere) but it is actually not. You will not realize this until someone reports a problem or you yourself identify the problem by manually running the script.

Well, what is the fix now? Can Get-WMIObject support a timeout parameter. No, I couldn’t find any such option. But the dotnet name space(System.Management)  has this facility. I wrote a wrapper function that works on top of Dotnet classes to query the WMI classes of remote computer. This function takes 4 parameters. (1) ComputerName (2) Class (3) NameSpace and (4)TimeOutInSeconds. These parameters are self descriptive so need to explain much.

CODE:

Function Get-WmiObjectCustom{            
[cmdletbinding()]            
param(            
 [string]$ComputerName = $env:ComputerName,            
 [string]$NameSpace = "root\cimv2",            
 [int]$TimeoutInseconds = 60,            
 [string]$Class            
)            

try {            
 $ConnectionOptions = new-object System.Management.ConnectionOptions            
 $EnumerationOptions = new-object System.Management.EnumerationOptions            
 $timeoutseconds = new-timespan -seconds $timeoutInSeconds            
 $EnumerationOptions.set_timeout($timeoutseconds)            
 $assembledpath = "\\{0}\{1}" -f $ComputerName, $NameSpace            
 $Scope = new-object System.Management.ManagementScope $assembledpath, $ConnectionOptions            
 $Scope.Connect()            
 $querystring = "SELECT * FROM {0}" -f $class            
 $query = new-object System.Management.ObjectQuery $querystring            
 $searcher = new-object System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher            
 $searcher.set_options($EnumerationOptions)            
 $searcher.Query = $querystring            
 $searcher.Scope = $Scope            
 $result = $searcher.get()            
} catch {            
 Throw $_            
}            
return $result            
}

Usage:

Get-WMIObjectCustom -Class Win32_ComputerSystem -ComputerName PC1 -TimeoutInSeconds 20

I found this approach organically in MSDN blog and modified the code to make it as advanced function so that it can support error handling better. Also modified a few pieces of code to make it look better.

Happy learning

I have seen many complaining that message recall is not working as expected in their environments. I too often receive queries related to it. Today one of my colleague asked me whether the message recall that she/he did will work for sure or not. My answer is “YES/NO/MAYBE”. Because I never seen it working in such a confidant and smooth manner. It surprised me every time. I wanted to do a deep dive into this topic from long time but never got a chance — but today I did. I searched a bit on internet and found a interesting link that answers most of the questions and clarifies how it works.

Though a few people described it as funny/fancy feature in all versions of exchange/outlook but never seemed worked as expected, I am still feeling that below scenarios are valid. At least in my case scenario#2 answered my question because no human mailbox will have auto-processing of meeting requests box enabled. This generally configured in conference room mailboxes/shared mailboxes.

But your case might be different, so go through these and let me know if you find this helpful. Happy learning.. 🙂

Source: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/recall-or-replace-an-email-message-after-it-is-sent-HA010354931.aspx

Scenarios that affect recall success

The success or failure of a message recall depends on the recipients’ settings in Outlook. In the following table, five scenarios are presented:

• Four scenarios that explain what happens when message recall is tried in various situations
• One scenario that describes what happens when the recall of a message that was sent to a Microsoft Exchange public folder is tried

When working with paths it is often required to find out the drive letter of of a path. I generally do this using Dotnet methods, but just realized that PowerShell has a buil-in way to do this.

The Split-Path cmdlet can help you doing this. Look at the before sample code.

function Get-DriveLetterFromPath {            
[cmdletbinding()]            
param(            
[parameter(mandatory=$true)]            
[string]$Path,            
[switch]$Resolve            
)            

Try {            
    if(Split-Path -Path $Path -IsAbsolute) {            
        Split-Path -Path $Path -Qualifier -Resolve:$Resolve -ErrorAction Stop            
    }            

} catch {            
    Write-Host "Failed to get drive letter. Details : $_"            
}            

}

This function has one mandatory parameter name -Path and one optional parameter -Resolve. The -Resolve parameter will resolve the path that you are passing through Path parameter.

Hope you find this useful.

In this post, I will show you how to use Powershell for enabling or disabling OU protection in Active Directory.

In my last post, we have seen how to query Organization Units in Active Directory that has protection enabled. Now we will see how to enable or disable this protection option using PowerShell.

As I said earlier, the ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion property of OU object stores the status of protection. In the below script I am using Set-ADOrganizationalUnit cmdlet from ActiveDirectory module to set this property.

The script takes DN of the OU object as input and verifies if it exists (see my previous post). It does it as part of parameter validation so that script can exit if a wrong OU path is provided. Rest of the code is very simple, and I hope it doesn’t require any explanation. However, please feel free to post questions if you have any.

Test this script in your test environment before you decide to use in production.

CODE:

function Set-OUProtection {            
[cmdletbinding()]            
param(            
[parameter(ParameterSetName="Enable")]            
[parameter(ParameterSetName="Disable")]            
[ValidateScript({[ADSI]::Exists("LDAP://$_")})]             
[string]$DN,            
[parameter(ParameterSetName="Enable")]            
[switch]$Enable,            
[parameter(ParameterSetName="Disable")]            
[switch]$Disable            
)            

try {            
 Import-Module ActiveDirectory -ErrorAction Stop            
} catch {            
 Write-Error "Failed to Import the active directory module"            
 exit(1)            
}            

Switch ($PsCmdlet.ParameterSetName) {            
 "Enable" {             
    try {            
     Set-ADOrganizationalUnit -Id $DN -ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion $true -ErrorAction Stop            
     Write-Host "Successfully enabled Protection on OU : $DN"            
     break            
    } catch {            
     Write-Host "Failed to enabled Protection on OU : $DN"            
    }             
   }            
 "Disable" {            
    try {            
     Set-ADOrganizationalUnit -Id $DN -ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion $false -ErrorAction Stop            
     Write-Host "Successfully disabled Protection on OU : $DN"            
     break            
    } catch {            
     Write-Host "Failed to disable Protection on OU : $DN"            
    }             
   }            

}            

}

Output: