Its January 1st and I have received my annual report from WordPress. No surprises in it really, apart from the fact that I thought I had updated it more throughout the year. Hopefully this will be fixed in 2012 as I have a few new projects that will require me to me more active in the community.

I might go back and review some of my past articles that gained me activity and see if they could use some improving, as I’m getting no feedback from the people who are reading them, and it feels kinda lonely not getting any comments, but hey, I don’t really leave comments either so I shouldnt complain.

The first half of the new year will involve a lot of projects both for my full-time job and for my community based effort, so finding time to blog about them will all come down to time management on my part.

For those interested, check out the link below to see the full report of my blog from the year.

Click here to see the complete report.

PCV

Type for following from a PowerShell command prompt after you have imported the AD settings:

Set-ADUser <username> –Title “Use quotes to eliminate possible errors”

And thats it! pretty simple. To confirm that his has worked type the following:

Get-ADUser <username> –Properties Title

So off I went to try and figure out how to change this setting in PowerShell/EMS, which turned out to be pretty easy.

To change the quota for a single user type the following at the EMS prompt:

Set-Mailbox –Identity <alias or email address>  -ProhibitSendQuota Unlimited

You can also specify the amount you want for the quota:

Set-Mailbox –Identity <alias or email address> -ProhibitSendQuota 209715200
OR
Set-Mailbox –Identity <alias or email address> –ProhibitSendQuota ‘2GB’

Other quotas you can change IssueWarningQuota and ProhibitSendReceiveQuota

To reset all your quotas to defaults:

Set-Mailbox –Identity <alias or email address> -UseDatabaseQuotaDefaults $true

When I first started looking at using PowerShell 2 in AD, I just got some code and starting punching it in, which of course didn’t work at all. Frustrated I started digging around and found out that you need to import the system modules first.

Next from the search bar type “Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell”, right click and select Run As Administrator. This will import all the Active Directory modules for PowerShell and make your life alot easier!

Once this is complete you have access to all the Active Directory modules in PowerShell. You can confirm this by typing Get-ADUser <Username> and hitting enter and you should  get some info about the user.

Now your all ready to rock and roll with PowerShell for Active Directory. My only gripe is that you need to do this every time you want to run PowerShell in AD, but I’m sure there is a reason for having to do that.

I also know that you can set it up in your PowerShell profile to load the AD modules are well, but I’ll cover that at a later time.

PCV

I’ll be the first to admit that I have never really seen much of a use for PowerShell where I work, mostly due to the size of the company.

Administering a site of about 100 users I know them all by name and what there needs are from there IT Dept. Everything I have read about PowerShell either involves some kind of repetitive task or bulk upload of information and is impractical on a smaller scale. Other PowerShell examples highlight tasks that I can do manually just as easily and the time saved by using PowerShell versus doing it manually is minimal. This is frustrating for me because I want to use PowerShell, I want to see what the fuss is about, so I am taking a challenge to figure out what I can use PowerShell for and of course write the code for it.

So with that I’m starting my most ambitious project to date, to blog about this subject for a period of time to make it a series of worthwhile articles!

Wish me luck

PCV

SYMPTOMS: Recipients do not receive your e-mail message when when booking meetings.

From: System Administrator
Sent: Friday, 8 April 2011 4:39
PM
Subject: Undeliverable: Test Meeting

RESOLUTION: When adding in recpients, make sure you add them using either the GAL or by typing in there full address. The issue seems to be with auto complete email addresses.

So what that in mind I bring you my quick and easy 5 second guide to knowing if KMS is working.

Firstly you will need to type the following commands from an elevated command prompt, even if you are an administrator (which I assume you would be) you need to run cmd.exe as an administrator.

Installing the KMS key

To install a KMS key type slmgr.vbs /ipk <KMS Key>
ipk stands for Install Product Key, it will also replace the exsisting key if one is already installed the server.

slmgr.vbs /dli will the Display the License Information. This includes the KMS channel, the license status, current count and total cumulative requests received from clients.

KMS in Event Viewer

KMS also logs all its activations to the Event Viewer, you can find it under Server Manager, Diagnostics, Event Viewer, Application and Services Logs, Key Management Service. This can help you with troubleshooting activation issues.

Set Network Location: The set network location doesn’t work when a workstation is joined to a domain. The reason for this is that the domain settings take precedence over all other network location settings. The assumption is that the network will have its only security settings.

Run As Administrator: This option will not work for domain users as you obviously will not want them running anything as administrator. My offsider seemed to insist that I had “locked it down too much” whenever he couldn’t do things like run cmd.exe as administrator. You need to Ctrl – Shift Right Click and Run as Different user then use a domain admin or equivalent account to do what you need to do.

Bitlocker: Make sure you setup bitlocker so it stores the HDD encryption keys in AD. This can only be done with Windows Server 2008 and above.

Open command window here: Windows 7 natively can open a command window at any location when browsing in Windows Explorer. While the hitting tab when in a command window to auto complete at command is great, this just might cut a couple of seconds and lot less typing when needing to dill down deep into a file structure.

In my company, we only had 1 logon script. It was used to do the usual stuff map network drives, add printers and a couple of other little things like reg key changes.

I dont know why, but I have never been a fan of logon scripts so when I was handed this Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 deployment I decided to get rid of the logon script if at all possible.

The great thing about Windows Server 2008 R2 is that Group Policy has all these great Preferences settings that you can control, and the first one that caught my attention was “User Configuration\Preferences\Windows Settings\Drive Maps”

The best thing to do when setting up a entry under the Drive Maps preferences is set the action as “Replace”, that way if you need to make changes in the future such as changing a location it will dynamically update as its replacing this setting if changed at each Group Policy refresh. We have 4 drives mapped and our users connect via VPN about 25% of the time. When they did this before, they had to run a script to remap the drives, as part of Group Policy its always mapped for them.

Under “User Configuration\Preferences\Windows Settings\Registry” you can apply any registry tweaks to workstations, which removes another use for a logon script at my company. I only have 2 reg key updates in there 1 for a communication software we use and another for the desktop wallpaper due to an issue with themes in Windows 7

Finally If you setup your sever as a Print server you can deploy your printers via Group Policy and that eliminates the need for a logon script at my workplace, while only a small thing and we only have 80 odd users I feel that it just all seems cleaner.

PCV

I had to design the SOE for work from the ground up and learn Window Server 2008 R2 and Altiris Deployment Solutions at the same time. Lots of document writing and alot more to come.

I must say it was a great experience for me, but carrying the success or failure of this whole project solely on my shoulders wasn’t without its stressful points, but for the most part I had a blast.

I’ve been quite impressed that this site has been getting 10 or so hits a day even with the few updates that are on it, but that should change soon as I want to document alot of what I found during the SOE design and pilot process as there seems to be so little information online about Windows 7 deployment to the enterprise.

I also have a few other projects coming up including replacing our Exchange 2003 server with Exchange 2010 and redesigning the DR centre, so I’m going to be busy for a few more months yet.

I deployed Windows 7 SOE the weekend before Easter and apart from the few little problems that you will always get, things seem to be running well and everyone is happy.

I had some fun and games, mostly with Cisco and there incompatibility with x64 bit technology, which caused me to totally redesign everything, so no x64 bit Windows 7 until Cisco gets its act together with WebEx.

The new environment is Windows 7 x86 bit with Office 2007 Standard with Bitlocker encryption and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise controlled by EPO. Software deployment is managed by Altiris Deployment Solutions on Windows Server 2008 R2.

PCV