combined IT ramblings
Yesterday, I needed to create a script that would allow me to stop a lot of services in one go, so I created a small one-liner script. However, as it could be dangerously easy to execute this by mistake, I decided to figure out how to apply WhatIf as a… Read more »
A little time ago, my (admin) user in Windows 10 was so badly damaged, that I had to re-create it. While that was easily done, I found that the NTFS rights on my D: drive were a bit odd: Every folder had inherited an ACL right from D:\ for my… Read more »
In PowerShell, there is the Get-Process cmdlet. However, this does not return the ParentProcessId property, so it is unsuitable for displaying an indented process tree, which you, for instance, could send by email. Luckily, there is the Get-WMIObject cmdlet that can return the ParentProcessId. How to get a Process Tree… Read more »
Reading the Windows registry from PowerShell can be a bit cumbersome, when all you wanted to retrieve is the value of an item under a key, at least with PowerShell version before v5. The Get-ItemProperty can be used to enumerate the items and their values under a registry key, but… Read more »
This post contains a few (short) useful PowerShell functions and snippets, that you can include in projects and/or your profile, and some which showcase some peculiar solutions to problems in PowerShell. This one is for use in your profile, so you can see in Alt-Tab which Powershell console is running… Read more »
When checking my cloned Ubuntu 14.04 LTS VM, I noticed that it still contained the volume group name from the original, which is of course not desired. It seemed fairly simple, but I kept receiving an error with update-grub, reporting the old Volume Group name: /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: failed to get… Read more »
Eth0 static IP address configuration On the latest version of Raspbian (in my case, Raspbian GNU/Linux 8), you should not use /etc/network/interfaces to set up your networks. All configuration has been offloaded to the dhcpcd client. For a static IP address on the eth0 interface, you’ll need to edit file /etc/dhcpcd.conf For… Read more »
This bug I encountered last week. While writing a system to define printers and TCP/IP ports in bulk on Windows 2008 R2 servers, I got the report from the testers that a color printer defined with the HP Universal Printer PCL 6 driver wasn’t recognized as color when the port… Read more »
Note: An update of this article for Windows 10 can be found here One of the more useful Windows features for Windows administrators is the Remote Server Administration Tools pack (RSAT). Apart from allowing you to install GUI elements in the Administrative Tools menu, this can also install the command-line… Read more »
The other day, I noticed something strange with Windows 7’s runas.exe command. When I specify a local user, a local administrator for instance, I normally use the “period-notation”, like: .UserName However, RUNAS.EXE threw an error at me: “RUNAS ERROR: Unable to acquire user password”. Luckily, this was easily solved. I… Read more »