Category Archives: Windows

Starting My Journey through #90Days2MCSA

Posted by on April 9, 2013 2 comments

Hello Everyone! I apologize for my months disappearance from blogging, it’s been a busy March and will continue to be busy throughout TechEd! That is not a bad thing, and I will strive to increase my blogging. One thing that is going to help me in the interim is my Journey to my Server 2012 MCSA!

Michael Bender along with MS Learning has made a push for people to obtain their MCSA with the #90Days2MCSA Challenge, this is a fantastic idea is a great way as a community for everyone to improve their skills.

I’d like to start off by saying I may be a featured certification success story on the 90Days2MCSA site; however I do not have my Server 2012 MCSA yet and that means I get to participate! I’ve been hiding in the shadows and doing some studying with the official Microsoft Press 70-417 Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012.

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Perform Survey’s and Randomly Selecting Users – Using Office Web Apps

Posted by on February 26, 2013 2 comments

Next week we have the first Indianapolis PowerShell User Group meeting and I was tasked with getting the survey for our meetings setup. I did not want to follow the standard here is a piece of paper please fill out and turn back in. So I decided to use the “cloud” way of passing out surveys.

The nice thing about SkyDrive is the Office Web Apps. These web apps include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. With Excel you are able to create Survey’s and provide anyone the link. These surveys are saved in an Excel document and synced with any computer that you have SkyDrive running on. These documents are being saved to my local machine gives me the ability to execute a PowerShell script on them which will throw out winners from the list of people who submitted the survey.

Excel_Survey_WebApp

Lets start…

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Storage Space Virtual Disk Disconnected on Restart

Posted by on February 9, 2013 No comments

So I recently had to rebuild my Server 2012 virtual server. I had storage spaces setup and after I finished the install the Virtual Disk was not mounted. I realized that I was able to bring it all back online, but every restart it had to remount the VHD.

I had decided there must be a way to fix it and decided to see what the properties were within PowerShell. I ran a Get-VirtualDisk which showed me my single VHD (pictured below)

I was thrilled when I saw the IsManualAttach property, with a simple execution of Set-VirtualDisk Data -IsManualAttach 0, I executed a Get-VirtualDisk and verified it took the settings change. After a restart the VirtualDisk was already mounted and resolved my problem with only two PowerShell commands.

Indianapolis PowerShell User Group

Posted by on December 30, 2012 No comments

You heard that right the Indianapolis PowerShell User Group is going to actually start meeting! This user group was started a couple of years ago by my good friend John Gullion but it never really took off. Over the summer we had a few conversations about jump starting it but we never got around to it. Yesterday we met and decided we are going to get this accomplished! So this post is to let all of my readers know if they are located within Indiana they need to join the Indianapolis PowerShell User Group! You can find the site at http://indypowershell.org and register.

Our first meeting will be March 6th 2013, and we will be co-presenting some of the new features with PowerShell Version 3, we have a couple of ideas for future presentation but we welcome people who would like to present to contact us.

Join Indy PowerShell!

Backup Linux using PowerShell

Posted by on December 28, 2012 No comments

As a follow up to Backups are Important! Here is How I do it! I decided I should let everyone know how I am handling remote backups on my blog. It’s not hard to see that I am obviously a Windows guy, I am also glad to admit that I personally prefer Linux Servers for my blog, it’s a smaller impact, and much much cheaper; although I have considered Azure more than once.

Weapon-overkill

So as I have listed on my last blog post I was bit in the rear on backups and decided to go for overkill. I already have a ton of storage at home so I figured there had to be a way for me to utilize that storage and have a remote backup that isn’t in my Dropbox and isn’t a manual process. So I began researching ways to interface with SFTP, I found out that WinSCP has .NET Assemblys available, and I’ll admit I am far from a programmer and didn’t want to try to hook into that using PowerShell. So I let it sit for a couple of weeks and by god an example of exactly what I wanted to do was posted, and all I had to do was minor tweaks.

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