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Showing posts from September, 2013

system center orchestrator 2012 unleashed

i completely forgot to blog about this on its release. you’ve probably already seen all my hassling about it on linkedin or twitter already so this is old news anyway, right? :) the orchestrator book is finally released. it’s available on amazon in both paperback and kindle edition. if you don’t know orchestrator yet, it’s time to learn. it’s pretty neat stuff. quite happy it’s finally out! here’s a complete description: Using System Center 2012 Orchestrator, you can capture and document processes across your entire IT organization, establishing the automation you need to deliver advanced cloud services and self-adjusting computing resources. Authored by five leading System Center experts, this comprehensive reference and technical guide brings together all the knowledge you’ll need to architect, install, implement, integrate, and maximize the value of your own Orchestrator solutions. The authors introduce current best practices based on large-scale enterprise implementations the

PowerShell: Accessing the Clipboard

Every time I do something in PowerShell, I find something else new to love. I’m pretty familiar with using “mycommand | clip” to send something directly to the clipboard. Found out that retrieving stuff from the clipboard is almost as easy: > Write-Output "crap" | clip > [System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard]::GetText() crap   UPDATE: Added the below statement because I run into this constantly when working with arrays. This splits your array on whitespaces. $myVar -split '\s+' Thank you to PowerShelladmin.com for this goodness on split operators.

orchestrator: ftp integration pack error

i was recently assigned some work that required automating some ftp tasks. i thought what a perfect opportunity to try out the ftp integration pack (IP) in orchestrator! after configuring the ftp options, i tried to use one of the activities and hit a problem: failed to initialize configuration object .   YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS PART i don’t normally look at stack traces and know what the hell is going on so i immediately went to my crutch and starting searching the entire world of knowledge and finally landed on this post describing the exact same problem. in the end, the original poster (OP) fixed the issue by uninstalling all of his IPs and reinstalling them. that seemed like total crap to me so i dismissed it and forgot about it until yesterday when i found some time to really look at this problem.   (OR THIS) THE ANALYSIS i had two environments to work with, both not working. the first thing i tried was the OP’s fix. i uninstalled everything and reinstalled the ftp IP.

winnate: upgrading a windows 8.1 preview version to rtm

you might have missed the news, but windows 8.1 and server 2012 r2 rtm versions are available for download now. in celebration of this occasion, i draw upon your memory. remember this FULLY UNSUPPORTED little gem when you upgraded your beta version of windows 8 to rtm ? uh huh. yes, you do. use at your own risk. feeling like living dangerously? here’s how it’s done: expand the installation media or copy to a writeable location open the directory “sources” locate the file named “cversion.ini” modify the content, changing the values to: [HostBuild] MinClient=9431.0 MinServer=9431.0 now away you go. when you install, it’ll treat it as if you’re installing over windows 8, not windows 8.1 preview. :)

searching for an object by guid in active directory

before we get started, why the need for this? well, you can’t straight up search active directory for an object with a guid that looks like this: {af966e8e-7aee-4c0f-b0c8-1985de37c276}. this is referred to as “registry format.” there are two ways to do this as i will illustrate below.   the short way adfind -binenc -f "objectguid={{GUID:af966e8e-7aee-4c0f-b0c8-1985de37c276}}" handles all the conversions quite nicely as long as you specify the correct type.   the long way $myGUID = [guid]'af966e8e-7aee-4c0f-b0c8-1985de37c276' $myGUIDhex = –join ($myGUID.ToByteArray() | % { $_.tostring("X").padleft(2,"0")}) $myGUIDhex = $myGUIDhex -replace '(..)','\$1' get-qadobject –ldapfilter "(objectguid=$myGUIDhex)" switches the guid to hex and builds an value that looks like 8E6E96AFEE7A0F4CB0C81985DE37C276 and eventually \8E\6E\96\AF\EE\7A\0F\4C\B0\C8\19\85\DE\37\C2\76 which is used in the search filter.   learned a few thi

2012 r2 series: enhancements to iaas

oh man, a two-part post! that means twice the reading, twice the summarizing and twice the condensing. :/ oh well. at least all this typing will help warm up my new sculpt keyboard . :) this is the fifth post in the series. read the full post composed of iaas innovations and service provider & tenant iaas experience whenever you get around to it. this covers the first part. r2 enhancements in networking continuous availability (with in-box NIC teaming ) scvmm has ability to management network switches: extensible hyper-v virtual switch hyper-v network virtualization (hnv) ip address management (ipam) : better integration with scvmm virtual address space management granular role-based access control (rbac) enhanced dhcp management enhanced powershell support standards-based switch management – industry standard management schema to treat physical and virtual switches alike using an interface like powershell   r2 enhancements in compute quality of service