So, I normally need to build a Lab for my SolarWinds Orion. If I’m doing this on my own machine and don’t have the luxury of a Windows Deployment Server (WDS), and I’ve built a custom hard drive for my Windows Servers, then I use a PowerShell script to do this work for me. (Seeing a pattern here?)
PowerShell
Creating a Windows Server Hard Drive “Template” for Hyper-V
This may not be the “official” way to create a template for Hyper-V according to Microsoft, but if you are running in an environment without SCCM or WDS (or on your personal machine), I’ve found that this process works very well.
This is fairly simple list of tasks, but it’s very long. Thankfully, you’ll only need to do this once and then you can re-use the image as many times as you like. I update mine once a quarter (to get the newest updates).
Tweak where it’s appropriate for your build.
Configure IIS Logging
I always move my IIS logs to a different drive, and I almost always include all fields. This is something that annoys me since I have to do it over and over again. Just like everything that I have to do over and over again, I wrote a script to do it for me. The … Read more
Moving SolarWinds Logs to a new Drive
I built a script which facilitates changing the default logging location for most SolarWinds programs in a SolarWinds Orion installation. Not every log can be moved, but this script does change the majority of the log locations and also takes a backup of the original file beforehand. The important part is the RegEx that is used … Read more
Removing Default Web Site & Application Pool
I’m always sick and tired of having to remove the IIS Default Web Site and DefaultAppPool after I’ve installed the Web Roles in Windows Server 2012 R2. So, I created a short script that will remove them. DISCLAIMER: These materials are provided “AS IS” without any express or implied warranty of any kind.
Required Windows Features with SolarWinds Orion
My presentation is completely built around optimizing your SolarWinds Orion installation. In that presentation, I make reference to several scripts that I use to help me in provisioning Orion Servers. One such script is used to install the necessary Windows Features for each role. It uses XML files as the source for which features are needed … Read more
Geocoding Longitude and Latitude using PowerShell and the Google Maps API
So, I ran into an issue where I needed to convert a ton of addresses to map points for use with a database. It’s not something that I have to do too often, but I decided to look through the documentation for Bing, Google, OpenStreet, and MapQuest API’s.
Converting RTF to TXT via PowerShell
So I ran into a problem recently where I needed to convert an RTF document back to it’s base text values. I could do it via a copy & paste, but after digging around a little bit, I happened on an article from Microsoft with some pointers. How to: Convert RTF to Plain Text (C# … Read more
Identifying Old ActiveSync Devices
Using the Exchange Management Console, you can easily identify ActiveSync devices which are out of sync for a period of time. This is just a re-hash of multiple other posts, but I still think that the way in which I identify the devices is unique. I used only one variable in this script; $Days – … Read more
Exchange 2003 RUS to Exchange 2010 EAP
Like many of you, I’ve run into the fun situation of moving the Exchange 2003 Recipient Update Services to Exchange 2010’s Email Address Policy. Although the Exchange Team Blog has a great script (which I highly suggest that you use) for migration, I thought that it might be best to get a list of accounts … Read more