When using the assignVolumeChap verb you will need to supply a volume that you will be enabling authentication on, which is done using the volumeName option. You will also need to assign a password that will be entered on devices in order to connect to the target/volume, done using the targetSecret option. With most commands you will also need to specify the address of the storage node, the administrative user for that storage node and the password for it as well, these done using login, userName and passWord options respectively. You can obtain information about volumes using the getLocalVolumes verb:

cliq getLocalVolumes

To put all of these together, let’s look at an example where the storage node has an IP address of 192.168.100.100, an administrative user name of admin and an administrative password of ADMINPASSWORD. For this storage node we have a volume that we have created called MYSHAREDVOLUME and want to use a password of PASSWORDFORLUN to access it.

cliq assignVolumeChap volumeName=MYSHAREDVOLUME targetSecret=PASSWORDFORLUN login=192.168.100.100 userName=admin passWord=ADMINPASSWORD

Some other important verbs we’ve had to use are createCluster, connectVolume, configureRaid, createRemoteSnapshot (which is good to do before making any changes btw) and of course, createVolume (which you would need to do before assigning authentication to the volume). Each item that has a create typically has an associated delete (eg – deleteVolume, deleteRaid, etc) and an associated modify (eg – modifyVolume, modifyRaid, etc), which can be used to remove the added item and edit it (respectively). Overall, there are a lot of verbs that can be used with cliq, making it a somewhat robust scripting interface if you need to automate events.

Another verb I find that I use a lot when I’m first setting up a device is the getPerformanceStats verb, which has a single option in interval, the number of milliseconds between sampling the performance statistics.Similar Articles:

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There are two ways to call CoRD from the command line. The first is similar to how we handled VNC in an earlier article. Simply leverage the open command and call the URL with a rdp in the beginning. For example, if you want to open a connection to a server called windows.krypted.com you would use the following command:

open rdp://windows.krypted.com

As with VNC you can also inject he user name and the password as well. To do so insert the username after the rdp:// and with an @ before the domain or IP. And to inject the password follow the username with a : and then the password followed by the @. For example, if our username were daneel and our password were seldon then the command would be:

open rdp://daneel:seldon@windows.krypted.com

There are other options as well, which you can find at the CoRD Wiki. You can also connect by calling the CoRD command, which is located in the /Applications/CoRD.app/Contents/MacOS directory. The CoRD command then has the following options:
host – define the IP address or host name of the computer you are connecting to
port – if a custom port (not 3389) is used then use that to connect to the computer
u – define a username
p – define a password
d – Windows domain name
a – set screen depth to 8, 16, 24 or 32
width – set the width of the resultant window
height – set the height of the resultant window

So if you would like to connect to windows.krypted.com with the same user and password as before, but now with a custom port of 3390 you would use the following command:
/Applications/CoRD.app/Contents/MacOS/CoRD -host windows.krypted.com -port 3390 -u daneel -p seldon

I guess next I’m going to have to build a Dashboard widget to fire up a connection on the fly… Similar Articles:

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C:\Windows\Inf\Usbstor.pnf
C:\Windows\Inf\Usbstor.inf

You may also need to add the System account to the Deny list for those files, but in my experience you don’t always need to do so.Similar Articles:

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[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the Show Desktop.scf and then drag it to the Quick Launch bar. You are now off to the races. You can also use this script to create an icon and pin it somewhere in Windows 7; pretty useful if you miss Show Desktop… Now that I’ve gotten to this point, why stop?How might we do the same thing in Mac OS X? Stay tuned…Similar Articles:

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Additionally I added a number of new pages worth of commands, FTP Commands, Windows Commands, Final Cut Server Commands, Amazon S3 Commands, Podcast Producer Commands and Xsan Commands; both of which are wikis as well.Similar Articles:

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• providers – lists components that can create and maintain shadow copies
• shadows – lists shadow copies
• shadowstorage – lists storage that can be used for shadow copies
• volumes – lists volumes that have shadow copy enabled
• writers – lists registered components of applications that store persistent information on a volume with shadow copy enabled

You can create a shadow copy of a volume using the vssadmin command along with the create shadow verb. You would also need to specify which drive you will be creating a shadow copy of using the /for option. For example:
vssadmin create shadow /for=C:

Once you have created a shadow copy you can then add more storage to it using the vssadmin add shadowstorage command. Here, you’d indicate the volume to enable shadow copy /for and then the volume to put the shadow copy storage /on and finally the maximum size with /maxsize, as follows:
vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=c: /on=d: /maxsize=1tb

Once you have storage, you can also resize it. To do so use the resize verb and then mimic what you did previously, when adding shadowstorage but replacing the maxsize variable with a new number. For example:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=d: /maxsize=100gb


In addition to being able to resize the storage you can also delete it using the delete verb along with shadowstorage. For example:
vssadmin delete shadowstorage /for=c: /on=d:


And finally you can also delete shadows themselves
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /all

Or to just delete the oldest:
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /oldest

Or finally, to just delete one from the list of shadows (where the X’s are replaced with your shadow id obtained using the list shadows):
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /shadow=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX


Still can’t seem to make it work with Samba on Mac OS X, but that’s another story for another day…  :)Similar Articles:

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To sweep, mop and do tasks beyond those that have been automated for 30 or more years we’re going to need to employ the help of robotics. To most, robotics just seem really expensive. But if you’ve seen Robot Wars you should know by now that not all people who build robots are actually made of money. And if there is to be large scale introduction of robotics in the home, again beyond the automations that we have used for decades, integration needs to be cost effective. iRobot has been a company that has been getting simple, robotic devices at a price point that makes its products accessible in the home.

For starters, there’s the Roomba. The Roomba is a vacuum cleaner that, well, runs itself. There’s also a cousin to the Roomba, the Dirt Dog Workshop Robot, which will do pretty much the same stuff as the Roomba but is designed for messy workshop areas with more dirt and less carpet… Most have already heard of the Roomba though and in addition, there’s newer products from iRobot that can clean gutters, mop and even clean pools. The gutter cleaner is the Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot, which is a bit of a departure from a demure little disk that looks like something Buck Rogers wore around his neck (iRobot’s future maybe) and a little more like a tank with a weird gutter cleaner thingie in the front (I’m sure the good folks at iRobot have a slightly more technical term for it).

The mop though, is to me one of the most interesting. Most don’t consider robotics to mix with water. But the Scooba Floor-Washing Robot is just that, a robot with a tank of Clorox floor cleaner in it. It will mop your floors while you’re out to the grocery store so you get home and the hardwood floors, tile or linoleum are all sparkly and nice. Helpful if you have a baby that likes to launch food across the room in your home…

And once you’ve made the leap to put liquid inside the robot you might as well straight up submerge the thing. The Verro Pool-Cleaning Robot is the most expensive retail robot that iRobot makes, but it has the potential to save savvy pool owners in warmer states a lot of money. It certainly doesn’t replace a professional pool cleaning service, but is likely to reduce the frequency that they are needed. And once you have the control aquatic environments down you might as well move into the ocean with iRobots since they make underwater oceanic robots as well. And then if you can do all that other stuff, you might as well get into diffusing bombs. Overall, I’m impressed with how well iRobot as a corporation has managed to expand their portfolio and some of the talent they’ve brought in to help them do so.

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Microsoft also fine tuned their application publishing environment, RemoteApp, their terminal services proxy, now called Remote Desktop Services Gateway) and and tweaked RDP to include a number of new Windows 7 like features. While all of this new stuff is great to have, Microsoft is still not going to give VMware much of a run for their money as ESX jumped a whole new level forward with vSphere. Having said that, Hyper-V becomes more mature with each release and is now fully integrated into Windows Server.

R2 also supports remotely connecting to another servers Server Manager console, which will likely reduce the number of times you’re establishing Remote Desktop connections to hosts. It also has a Best Practices Analyzer for each service and a new rev of PowerShell (along with a number of PowerShell commandlets wrapped in GUIs).

But Charles, you said Windows 7? Sure I did. R2 adds DirectAccess and BranchCache, two new ways to have remote accessibility for remote clients (rather than using a VPN) and remote workers respectively. Windows Deployment Services also got a bit of a feature boost, namely to ease the migration path into Windows 7.

There’s also some new AD stuff. Authentication Assurance for Active Directory Federated Services allows for certificate mapping to OUs. djoin.exe can leverage an xml answer file for joining a client into Active Directory while it’s offline. In addition to exe’s there’s also a number (more than 75) of new commandlets for PowerShell. There’s also a recycle bin for those objects you really didn’t mean to delete and finally, a Active Directory Administrative Center, which is pretty much a commandlet wrapper that provides for task-based support administration (I’m on the fence about this one still).

IIS 7.5 is also pretty notable. It has new tie-ins for the newly mentioned next release of SQL Server and an automator-like task generator (another wrapper around PowerShell). Not that I’ve been able to test but apparently I can now use 256 logical processors and 32 with Hyper-V). There’s also new failover options (which I haven’t fully explored so I’ll not go into further detail on those yet), an unattended installation feature and more granularly defined cluster node behaviors in this latest generation of IIS.

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