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Showing posts from September, 2014

atlanta systems management user group 10.03.14

I cannot honestly believe it’s already time for our user group meeting. It’s one week from now. It’s kind of crazy how fast time goes by. It’s also a lot more effort to put these together than you would expect. So for that, I am grateful to all of the folks that help keep this going, all of the sponsors that help keep us eating, our perpetual sponsors that give us lots of great giveaways and benefits, all of the speakers that bring great content, and all of the people, like you, that come share your knowledge. At our last user group meeting, we took an opportunity to use the space in the MTC side of the Microsoft office. What we discovered was the interaction was entirely different than the classroom spaces. It provided a better environment for interaction which is ultimately what we’ve always strived for -- networking, meeting your peers in the industry, and sharing knowledge. That’s the benefit of tying into a user community. You grow your access to knowledge exponentially. Shavli

powershell: limitation on retrieving members of a group

If you have large group memberships, you might have already run into a limitation with Get-ADGroupMember where the cmdlet will fail with this message: get-adgroupmember : The size limit for this request was exceeded At line:1 char:1 (Don’t believe me? Go ahead; try it. I’ll wait.) It seems the limitation comes up when you query a group with more than 5000 members. The easiest way to get around this would be for Microsoft to come up with a switch that let’s you set the size limit. That’s probably also the longest wait. :) Not to worry, there are ways to get around it.   Get-QADGroupMember . Remember this cmdlet? It’s a part of the Quest AD cmdlets. Of course, Quest no longer exists after being gobbled up by Dell so your mileage may vary. It does include a –SizeLimit switch so you can merrily bypass the limitations with it. Get-ADGroup . If you query the group for its member property and expand it, you can get around the size limit. Here’s how it’s done: Get-ADGroup myLargeGrou

powershell: reset user password

UPDATE: screwed up the last one. corrected. :o)   things to remember when resetting account passwords. prompted (displays old, new password dialog) Set-ADAccountPassword userid unprompted (yeah, i don’t know why i’d choose this one, honestly.) Set-ADAccountPassword userid -OldPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText “myoldpassword” -force) -NewPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText “mynewpassword” -force) administrative reset (don’t know the old one, setting it for someone else) Set-ADAccountPassword userid -Reset -NewPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText “mynewpassword” -force)

powershell: converting int64 datetime to something legible

i find that i’m constantly converting AD datetime fields from something that looks like 130552642641560221 to something that looks like 9/15/2014 10:17:44 AM . i don’t know which you prefer, but to me, the second output is the one that most people won’t complain about when i give it to them. over on stackoverflow.com i found this post that wraps it up pretty nicely. so, let’s say you want to look at the lastlogontimestamp attribute of a user named marcus . here’s a typical command that would show you the output: get-aduser marcus -properties lastlogontimestamp | select lastlogontimestamp bam. you get the int64 value. personally, i get lost counting nanoseconds* after i exhaust what i can count on both hands. if you’re like me, you can convert this handily to a readable datetime format like this: get-aduser marcus -properties lastlogontimestamp | select @{ n= 'llts' ; e={[datetime]::fromfiletime($_.lastlogontimestamp)} } we’re just creating an expression in the hash t

enabling deduplication on unnamed volumes (and other stuff)

it dawned on me the other day that while i had enabled deduplication on my office computers, i never did enable it at home. back when ssd was very expensive, i had managed to get a very small drive (64gb.) well, it proved to be too small to be useful. i ended up replacing the optical drive with a secondary hdd. it runs out of the optical chassis so it spins slower. it did it’s job though – which was to provide more space for not often accessed things. cool. i ran into a couple of things while toying around. in case you didn’t know you could, windows 8.1 will support deduplication. you just have to get the binaries on to the os . once you install it and enable the features, you need to get into powershell to turn stuff on. so, here’s a primer on getting all the deduplication commands: gcm *dedup* | gcm –module deduplication (both work) CommandType     Name                            ModuleName   -----------     ----                            ----------   Function        Disable-Ded