The Gears Inside My Head

I'm not like some of these bloggers who live to post, it takes time and that's something I don't have a lot of.  Still, I really need to make an effort to post fixes when I find them. For example I just fixed an issue that has been plaguing us for weeks.  We are teetering between using Windows WSUS and a 3rd party product for patch management.  For now we will use WSUS.  I set up a global policy in our domain to assign each system to one of our two WSUS servers according to AD site.  We're not using client side targeting (yet) so the GPO setup is fairly straightforward. Initially about 2/3 of our systems registered with one or the other of the WSUS servers but the rest would not.  We tried everything but nothing would get these things to register.  The OS type ranged from XP to Server 2012 and everything in between. Finally One of the guys here hit on a Technet article that cinched it. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f983bb7b-cb...

Here is a little tidbit I came up with because I like to be picky about how my scripts run.  It forces a script to relocate itself and run from the C:\Scripts folder.  I usually prefer to place the comments that describe a line on the end of that line.  In this case I had to go below the line. $ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue" $rand = New-Object System.Random #--------------------[ Create and relocate to C:\scripts ]---------------------- if ( ! ( Test-Path - pathtype Container "C:\Scripts" )){     new-item C:\Scripts - itemType Directory - Force   #--[ Create local scripts folder. } $TargetPath = "C:\Scripts"                               #--[ Where the script "should" live $ScriptFullName = ( $MyInvocation . MyCommand ). Name         #--[ EX: script.ps1 $ScriptFullPath = ( $MyInvocation . MyCommand ). Path       ...

Well it's been a while.  I've since gotten a great new job and am back on my feet.  Busy as all get-out but that's a good thing. I thought I'd post this since even though it was easy to find I had never heard of it before and I expect others will be looking for info on it as well. I've been investigating a bizarre issue with desktop icons that's been plaguing users here at the new job. Here is what I found as well as an associated fix. Info taken from here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/e5b19898-2f3d-4ebc-a539-bbf2d8c75351/ This is the response to a question posed about desktop shortcuts mysteriously disappearing: This is a well-known problem, which as it turns out is actually a kind of twisted "feature" of Windows 7.  Basically, there's a script that Windows 7 runs that regularly checks your desktop shortcuts and if it finds more than 4 of them ...

I've been running DD-WRT on my LinkSys WRT54G routers for years.  It's always served me well.  I recently found out that if you want to make the new Windows 7 homegroups work you MUST have IPv6 connectivity on your LAN.  That does not work out of the box with DD-WRT.  It doesn't help that there hasn't been a new build of DD-WRT for a few years.  DD-WRT has IPv6 options but they are clunky and require additional scripting to work properly. So, I started looking for alternatives.  I had heard of Tomato firmware before but never tried it.  Seems the " Shibby " version has most of the features I wanted so I grabbed a copy.  I must say I am truly impressed.  This firmware has so many sweet features it almost blew me away.  Go to the site and check the list.  The really nice thing is that IPv6 support just works out of the box. The one issue I had was in flashing to the new firmware.  I would up bricking my WRT54GS v3.  N...

and sometimes you get in ones way... Just last week I was happily working on servers, decommissioning old equipment, writing scripts, and doing those things that a system admin does.  Then, wham, I get laid off.  The company is being reorganized and has to eliminate  1/3 of the staff.  A bit cliche I must say, to be laid off just before Christmas, but it is what it is.  So, here I am sending out resumes.  Oh well, life goes on.

I just ran into an issue where I had an older Ubuntu box running 8.10 which is not an LTS release and wanted to upgrade it.  Since it's no longer supported even doing simple updates wasn't working.  After searching the web a while I found a number of answers that combined allowed me to upgrade. I found I was getting these errors when doing the " do-release-upgrade"   Checking for a new ubuntu release    Failed Upgrade tool signature    Failed Upgrade tool     Done downloading extracting 'jaunty.tar.gz'    Failed to extract Extracting the upgrade failed. There may be a problem with the network or with the server. The following information is from numerous sources.  It worked for me, I cannot guarantee it will work for you.  Try not to do the upgrade over SSH as problems can occur. Note: Ubuntu has an upgrade guide that goes over upgrading older versions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades?a...