Pretty much every operating system has a hosts file. In that file, you can define a hostname and then set a target IP. In Windows, that file is called hosts.txt and located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\. By default, that %systemroot% is going to be C:\Windows. This makes the path to the file C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt. By default, you’ll see the following: 127.0.0.1 localhost loopback ::1 localhost When you edit the file, add a new line with the IP address then a tab then the hostname that you’d like to be able to ping to get the address in question. For example, to add server.krypted.com to point to 192.168.210.210, you’d add some lines to make…
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Use PowerShell to Query WMI on Windows Servers
I recently needed to check and see whether a backup drive (which was just a 4TB USB drive) was plugged into a server. But the server had no GUI, so I had to use the command line. There was no drive letter mapped to this drive, so I needed to use something else and I needed to make a script that could be used long-term. Luckily, PowerShell can be used to obtain WMI information on the hardware installed on a computer. This allows administrators to query WMI about the USB devices currently installed on a server. In the following command, we’re going to use gwmi from PowerShell and we’re going…
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Kill Processes In Windows
You always want to stop a process gracefully. However, sometimes it’s just not possible to do so. Sometimes, you have to kill a process. Sometimes you have to end a process or a process tree when you can’t restart them gracefully. To stop a process in Linux and Mac, use the kill command. In Windows, there’s a Powershell cmdlet called Stop-Process that enables you to terminate a process. As with kill, just add the process ID at the end of the command. For example, to stop process 318: Stop-Process 318 Or you can stop based on the name of the process using the -processname option. For example, to kill a…
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Selectively Import PST Files Into Outlook
I’ve written plenty about exporting mailboxes from Exchange. But what if you need to perform a selective import into Outlook? This is helpful for importing mail in date ranges, using an import to search for terms (common with litigation holds) and importing contacts and calendars. To get started, click Open from the File ribbon. When prompted, click on Import/Export. At the Import and Export Wizard screen, click on “Import from another program or file” At the “Import a File” screen, click on “Outlook Data File (pst)” At the Import Outlook Data File screen, choose the mailbox to import into and then click on the Filter button. Using the filtering…
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Migrating Symantec Enterprise Vault SQL Tables
If you use Symantec’s Enterprise Vault solution and you need to migrate the SQL tables for Enterprise Vault to another server, you might have noticed that it’s not as simple as dumping tables from one host, restoring tables to another and changing some information on the Enterprise Vault server. This process takes a lot of time and is a relatively painful endeavor. But now Symantec has made the process much simpler, releasing a migration tool just for the database, available here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support//index?page=content&id=TECH214373 I guess they were listening to customers who complained about the process. Good for them!
- Active Directory, cloud, Consulting, iPhone, Kerio, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Microsoft Exchange Server, Network Infrastructure, Windows Server
Dig TTL While Preparing For A Migration
Any time doing a migration of data from one IP to another where that data has a DNS record that points users towards the data, we need to keep the amount of time it takes to repoint the record to a minimum. To see the TTL of a given record, let’s run dig using +trace, +nocmd to turn off showing the version and query options, +noall to turn off display flags, +answer to still show the answer section of my reponse and most importantly for these purposes +ttlid to toggle showing the TTL on. Here, we’ll use these to lookup the TTL for the https://krypted.com/ A record: dig +trace +nocmd…
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APIPA, Not Just An Acronym Palindrome
The acrodrome (yes, I just made that up, although I wasn’t sure if palinym was a better choice – decided on acrodome because I wasn’t as afraid of Tea Party snipers coming to murder me as I would have been if I used palinym) APIPA stands for Automatic Private IP Addressing. APIPA is in every version of Windows since NT and all versions of Mac OS X. APIPA is a dhpc mechanism that provides dhcp clients with self-assigned IP addresses when DHCP servers are not available. When there isn’t a DHCP server available, APIPA assigns IPs from 169.254.0.1 to 169.254.255.254 with a default mask of 255.255.0.0. Clients leverage arp to…
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Put an ESX Virtual Machine Into Safe Mode
Sometimes you need to boot a system into Safe Mode. But with a virtual machine you don’t have enough time to put a Windows system into Safe Mode. To put a normal system into safe mode, you can just hit the F8 key when Windows is booting. But with a virtual machine the BIOS screen is by default set to go away in 0 settings. Therefore, you need to add a boot delay to mimic a physical host. To get a virtual machine in ESX to have such a boot delay, view all the virtual machines and then right click on the virtual machine you need to configure a delay…
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Powershell Goodies From Vexasoft
There are a number of features that make mass deployment of Mac OS X pretty easy. Some of these would be great to have in Windows. These range from systemconfiguration to networksetup and the ability to look at packages that have been installed and review their bills of material. Well, the good people at Vexasoft have built a number of Powershell libraries that, while they aren’t named as such, do a number of the features that these commands do, just for Windows clients via Powershell. And the best part is, a number of them are free. Let’s look at what some of these commands do: First, there are the cmdlets…
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Limiting The Number of Windows Users in Lion Server (aka How-to of hidden serveradmin settings)
Lion Server doesn’t have an option in the GUI for throttling the maximum number of users that can connect to the server via SMB. Nor does it have said option in the serveradmin interface. If you run the following, you would have previously seen the required setting: serveradmin settings smb The required setting (if controlled via serveradmin) is MaxClients= followed by the number of clients that you want to be the max: serveradmin settings smb:MaxClients=10 This is pretty easy stuff, but I have a point that goes beyond limiting the number of users. Not all of the settings that can be run through serveradmin are actually in the preferences any…