ESX – Shut down from Script/Command
KB ID 0000279 Problem I was asked the question last week “How do I shutdown my ESX server remotely from script”. The client had a temperature sensor in their server room and wanted to shutdown their ESX host if it got too hot, all his Windows servers got sent an SNMP trap from the temperature sensor, and that fires off a script to shut down the Windows servers. But this left the ESX host up and running. Solution I drew a...
Backing up a Remote Linux Machine With Windows (Using Rsync and Cygwin)
KB ID 0000892 Problem The goal here was for me to get a backup of my VPS server (Running CentOS 6). My background is primarily Windows based, so I wanted a solution where I can just run the backup from a Windows machine, (i.e. my my laptop) and let it connect, login and perform the backup. What is Rsync? If you are familiar with Robocopy it’s similar, it can perform a backup/sync of data and encrypt that data while it’s...
SEM – SPAMfighter Exchange Module – Installation and Configuration with Exchange 2013
KB ID 0000824 Problem “I seem to get a lot of spam”, and “I get a lot more spam than I used to” are right up there with “My computer is running slow”. It’s a problem that, eats up users time and fills your mail stores with junk, and time/disk space costs money. SEM is tiny! In a world where a graphics driver is now over 100MB the entire install suite is less than 11MB. This is going into my...
Windows – Users Home Drives Renamed to ‘My Documents’
KB ID 0000783 Problem This problem was originally identified by Microsoft here. But none of the fixes recommended by them were really practical in my clients situation. I did read one promising post that said, if you disable offline file caching by GPO this problem would cease. However this particular client HAD TO have that feature enabled (for Ranger Offline). Someone else had written a PowerShell script that ran through and...
Force Media Center to Update its Libraries
KB ID 0000627 Problem I use Media Center a lot, and the one thing that bugs me is, every time I add a new film or TV series etc, I have to restart Media Center, restart services, or reboot the entire media PC before I can see them in the list. After some searching it appears that Media Center uses the same repository/database of media that Windows Media Player uses. There is a convoluted method of stopping services, deleting files...