If Exchange 2007 queue is growing fast and you want to find who is the top contributor, below code helps you. You need to run this code from a exchange management shell since the code involves Exchange cmdlets like get-message.

Find top 10 senders in Exchange Queue:

$senders = @{}
$queuemessages = Get-message -Resultsize unlimited
$queuemessages | % { $senders[$_.FromAddress] = $senders[$_.FromAddress] + 1 }
$senders.getenumerator() | sort value -last 10

Similarly you can filter the Get-Message output by recipients to get the top recipients.

Since windows core provides a CLI based interface, it necessitates learning command line stuff for system administrators. Though most of the tasks can be performed remotely, tasks related to network has to be done from the Core console itself. Here in this post, I will provide you two simple commands to enable and disable network connections from Windows 2008 Core console.

First let’s see the list of network adapters available in the server.

Netsh interface ipv4 show interface

Now disable the connection with name “Local Area Connection 2”

netsh interface set interface “Local Area Connection 2” DISABLE

Similarly, to enable a connection back, just replace DISABLE with ENABLE in above command.

I recommend doing these operations from server console(or ILO/DRAC) directly as this can cause network interruptions and running these commands can take your server out of network. Cross verify the commands and run them with caution.

I came across a nice service which makes the task of following up with other parties very easy. The advantage with this service is it works through email; that means you can create/read follow-ups anytime anywhere. Visit http://www.followupthen.com/ to know more about it. Btw, I started using this 🙂

See this video to get a sense of what it is…

I have seen this problem randomly on my windows 7 computer. After close observation, I found that DRAG and DROP won’t work from low privileged window to High privileged window. I generally run a command prompt with administrator and try to drag drop items from my explorer to the elevated command prompt. Since the elevated command prompt is running in high privilege mode, and my explorer in low privilege mode, drap-drop from explorer to cmd is not working. Whereas same operation to a normal command prompt is working without any issues since it is in the same privilege mode as my explorer.

I hope this small briefing helps you come out of drap-drop dilemma.

Btw, command prompt appears like below when it is in high privilege mode.

I earlier authored https://techibee.com/powershell/kill-a-process-on-remote-machine-using-powershell-remoting/262 to demostrate how to kill a process on remote computer. Today when my colleague asked for it, I revisited this article again and felt we can do in much better and easy way.

Say if the computers are in a text file called comps.txt, the script follows like this.

$comps = Get-content c:tempcomps.txt

foreach ($comp in $comps) {

invoke-command -computer $comp { get-process notepad | stop-process -force}

}

In this example I am killing notepad process. You can replace the name with process you want to kill on remote computer.

“How to audit local administrator password on list of servers using a script” — this is the question I have seen in one of the forums I participate. The requester asked for a way to read local administrator password on a server and compare it with the standard password and report deviations if any. While this sounds like a good algorithm to audit, I wonder how one can “READ” passwords of any account in Windows Operating System. But still requirements are requirements and we need a way to address them.

After thinking for sometime, I recollected one of the old tricks I have used during my initial days of system administration. “Accessing of other systems resources(like C$) works if the source(from where you are trying to access) and target systems are running with same local administrator password”. That means you should login to system with local administrator password and then you should be able to manage remote systems if they have same password with which you logged into the current one. I felt why can’t I use this to audit the administrator password.

I quickly wrote a powershell script(code below) of few lines and tested. It worked like a champ. So, what I am trying to do here is, accessing the c$ share of remote computer. This works if the remote computer password is same as the one with which I logged into current computer; otherwise it fails. Is n’t it enough to audit the admin rights and identify the computers which are not having the correct password? I feel this should be good and quick.

$servers = Get-Content c:tempserverslist.txt$servers | % {

if(Test-Path “\$_c`$windows”) {

Write-Host “Local administrator account on $_ has same password”

}  else  {

Write-Host “Local administrator account on $_ has different password”

}

}

 

 

 

 

I would be more happy if you can suggest a more efficient way of doing this.

I came across a couple of RAID disk space calculators day before yesterday and thought of sharing them. They basically helps you to figure out the usable space you get out of your available disks when configured under a particular RAID level(say RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, etc). It also gives sufficient information about each RAID level like no. of disks it should have etc. Another good thing is, they are available online. So you can connect and calculate anytime. Below are the links.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raid-estimator.htm

http://www.icc-usa.com/raid-calculator.asp

Let me know have comes across any such interesting tools.

This is a new thing which I came across today. $OFS is a special variable that contains the string to be used as the Ouptut Field Seperator when an array is converted to a string.  By default, this is ” ” but you can change it.

PS C:temp1>
PS C:temp1> $a=(“a”,”b”,”c”,”d”)
PS C:temp1> $a
a
b
c
d

As you can see in above example, $a is a character array which has a,b,c,d as members. When you print them each character is coming in new line. If I convert this char array to string what is the expected output? “abcd” right? No…you are wrong… see below…

PS C:temp1> [string][char[]]$a
a b c d
PS C:temp1>

There is a space between each character. This happened because $OFS is coming into picture here and inserting a space between each character.

PS C:temp1> $OFS=”/”
PS C:temp1> [string][char[]]$a
a/b/c/d
PS C:temp1>

In the above code I have explicitly changed the $OFS value to “/” which made the conversion to insert a “/” symbol between characters. You can nullify $OFS to avoid any sort of delimiters when you convert a char array to string.

Hope this helps…

I know many people have already figured it out in powershell way. I got similar requirement today morning where I have to check hardware make and model of 10 servers. That made me to recollect one of my old experience where I wrote a VB script to do the task. That time it took almost 2-3 hours to make the script ready. It took so long because of two reasons, number#1 I am new to VB scripting, number#2, I don’t know how to get this information. But it didn’t take that long today because of powershell as number#1 is not valid as I already gained some knowledge and number# as I already know from where I should get this info. So, I wrote below code in three minutes and gathered the output.

function get-hwinfo {

param($computer)

gwmi -query “select * from win32_computersystem” -computername $computer | select Name, Manufacturer, Model

}

$servers = Get-Content c:tempservers.txt

$servers | % { Get-hwinfo -computer $_ }

Hope this little code help you to pull the required information from servers.  I will try to write a script to gather complete hardware configuration when I get some time. 

Do you have a complete script which can get full hardware details? Share it.