Map a network drive using PowerShell

Make sure you are using the latest version of PowerShell. On Windows 8/10 run it as administrator and type the following:

Where: Z – is the Drive Letter Within ” ” is the path of the network share that will be presented as the root of the drive letter Z The -Persist parameter so … Read moreMap a network drive using PowerShell

Speed up Active Directory & DNS replication between Sites

Using the standard GUI Microsoft Management Consoles to make the change to speed up Active Directory replication is not possible. The best result of using administrator consoles will be to increase domain replication between domain controllers to 15 minutes. These large time values were instituted into Active Directory at version 1 because inter-site connections during that era of computing and networking were much lower in bandwidth with the most common being frame-relay or … Read moreSpeed up Active Directory & DNS replication between Sites

Guide to migrate FRS to DFSR

For most users this article only applies if you have Window 2003/ 2003 R2 Domain Controller in your enviornment that you are planning to get rid off. Pretty soon I hope! 😉 SYSVOL is a folder shared by domain controller to hold its logon scripts, group policies and other items related to AD. All the … Read moreGuide to migrate FRS to DFSR

The Lazy Way To Do Active Directory Inventory

From time to time admins have to run an inventory of what is running in the AD environment. This is a good practice for audits, inventory, removing decommissioned servers, or any other good reason. The details that are required are like when was computer/ server created, when was it last logged into, what is the … Read moreThe Lazy Way To Do Active Directory Inventory

Adding a security group to the Local Administrator Group in AD

Having a local administrator of your workstations can come in handy. Sometimes you might need to logon locally to troubleshoot or rejoin a computer to your domain. You can create a group policy that creates a local admin users and sets the local password. Admins make a common mistake when they want to add a … Read moreAdding a security group to the Local Administrator Group in AD

Lists all users last logon time

As administrators we often want to check which users have not logged in for quite a while, or what accounts recently accessed a system, etc. The following script list all users and their last logon time. With the lastloggeduser.csv we can get fancy with excel to find differences based on age and more.

 

Resolve IP Addresses from List of Host Names

If you have a list of hostnames/servers that you need IP addresses for its cumbersome to ping each server and get the ip address. PowerShell to the rescue! To do this we need a file called Server.txt with each server’s hostname on each line. I am storing the file in D:\Data\Servers.txt. Once we run the … Read moreResolve IP Addresses from List of Host Names

Connecting to a remote domain controller using PowerShell

Covering one of the basic day to day task if you are a Windows Administrator; connecting to the domain controller.  I try to minimize logging onto servers as much as possible.  Your thought should be around connecting to the server remotely and doing the work as needed instead of natively logging on to it. I … Read moreConnecting to a remote domain controller using PowerShell

A Beginner’s Guide to Checksum

Are you wondering what a checksum is? You may have noticed that when you download files from certain websites, they have a very long string of numbers and letters called a checksum or MD5 checksum or SHA-1, etc. These really long strings basically act as fingerprints for that particular file, whether it be an EXE, … Read moreA Beginner’s Guide to Checksum

Outlook 2016: Remove Duplicate entries in Room Finder

In Outlook 2016 some users may noticed dual entries in the Room List: The room list behavior that we see  in Outlook is by design. When we  use a Room List  for a meeting, it is stored in the  Most Recently Used entries in the registry. When we create a new meeting, we will see this MRU entry in the top of the Room Lists . The same Room List will be seen again in the drop down which … Read moreOutlook 2016: Remove Duplicate entries in Room Finder