Stop Windows 11 Upgrade
KB ID 0001773 Problem I have no problem with Windows 11, In fact I prefer its UI. But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that businesses will not be as quick to adapt Windows 11 as the general public. Some private companies spend ‘ages’ testing production OS’s with various applications, and getting a change to that config can be a ‘challenge’. So there are valid reasons for wanting to stop a...
How Many Users in AD? (User Count)
KB ID 0001748 Problem I had to get some stats from a number of customers earlier today, one of the stats I needed was the user count from within their respective Active Directories. If you have a tedious job to do, there’s usually a PowerShell command to help! Getting Object Numbers From Active Directory User Count (Get-ADUser -Filter *).Count Computer Count (Get-ADComputer -Filter *).Count Group Count (Get-ADGroup -Filter...
Enable Remote Desktop (Remotely)
KB ID 0001747 Problem Let’s say you want to RDP to a remote server (imagine such a thing!) But some doofus didn’t enable RDP? Well you can enable Remote Desktop via group policy and wait a while. I used to connect to the registry remotely and change the key that enabled RDP, but now you can do it with a simple PowerShell command. Not only will it enable Remote Desktop, it will also allow RDP on the Windows firewall (if...
Cannot Open Exchange Management Shell
KB ID 0001707 Problem When attempting to open the Exchange Management shell you see the following; Welcome to the Exchange Management Shell! Full list of cmdlets: Get-Command Only Exchange cmdlets: Get-ExCommand Cmdlets that match a specific string: Help ** Get general help: Help Get help for a cmdlet: Help or -? Exchange team blog: Get-ExBlog Show full output for a command: | Format-List Show quick reference guide: QuickRef VERBOSE:...
Exchange 2019: How Many CALs/SALs Do You Need?
KB ID 0001703 Problem At his point I’m going to assume you know that there are Standard Exchange CALs/SALs, and Enterprise Exchange CALs/SALs. And you know the difference! If you’re unsure see my comments here. With older versions of Exchange 2010/2007 etc. You could get this information from the GUI. Now you need to use some PowerShell. Solution The two commands you want to use are; Find Out How Many Exchange Standard...
Hard Drive Full?
KB ID 0000012 Problem The fact that I’m going back to re-write article 0000012, should tell you this is an omnipresent problem! Either very suddenly, or slowly over time you have a drive or a volume that’s full to bursting point. These days with laptops which have smaller SSD drives it’s a common problem. I’ve seen literally hundreds of post in forums, most of them are answered with ‘Use...
PowerCLI: Get All Snapshot Information
KB ID 0001690 Problem This was asked on EE today, and it was an interesting one so I wrote it up. How to locate all the Snapshots in your VMware virtual infrastructure, and see how much space they are taking. Solution Use the following PowerCLI; Get-Snapshot * | Select-Object -Property VM, Name, SizeGB, Children | Sort-Object -Property sizeGB -Descending | ft -AutoSize Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links...
Patch Your DNS Servers! SigRed
KB ID 0001687 Problem WARNING: This is rated 10 on the CVSS scale. Affected Server OS: Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2012, Windows 2012 R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 Yesterday Microsoft released a critical notice (KB4569509) to address vulnerabilities identified in (CVE-2020-1350). Basically it allows a remote attacker to perform remote code execution on your DNS servers (unless you patch them!) The reason its...
vSphere: Get ESX Server Serial Numbers
KB ID 0001670 Problem A few weeks ago I needed to sort out some extended warranty for a customers servers. To do that I needed the serial numbers of those servers, (a mixture of IBM/Lenovo and Dell Servers). As I didn’t fancy a drive to two different datacenters, I wanted to try and get them programatically. Solution After some searching I came across a post by one of my old EE buddies LucD with exactly what I needed. I’m...
Powershell: Get Folder Size ‘Quickly’
KB ID 0001660 Problem Right clicking a folder and selecting properties is usually how you would see how large a folder is. Which is great, but if your folder size is HUGE (i.e. many terabytes) then this takes ages! Solution If you use PowerShell you can get the figure considerably quicker! Below I want to ge the size of E:\Shared; In MegaBytes; “{0:N2}” -f ((Get-ChildItem -path E:\Shared -recurse | Measure-Object -property...