Busy with hopes of updates

It’s been quite a while (four months or so) since I last updated ShortShell. Mostly due to laziness but a good portion has been due to an extreme business. Since early March, I have been in hardcore study / absorb mode with many accolades to show for my hard work. Beyond four new Microsoft certifications since December, I also now have a second certification for ITIL version 3 (previously held version 2) Foundation. I am attending the local Twin Cities Powershell group on a monthly basis and will be joining the SCCM group pending time availability. I gave apheresis for the first time this year and have been searching for another time that fits into my schedule.

I’ve traveled to Colorado four to five times since November 2010 (I’ve lost track) and have totaled up close to a full month and a half of time away from home. Two weekends ago Holly traveled with me to Colorado for a short introduction into the fine state. We went horse back riding in Estes Park for 2 hours with some friends and then she flew back. All in all a quick trip for her but PTO is at a premium lately. There has been a death in the family and yet we will soon welcome in another member with my cousin’s upcoming wedding.

Starting May 2nd, I am to move back to my original position of Windows Operations. It has been a year plus that I have been out of that field and I’m frankly nervous about the work load. Next weekend I’ll be traveling back to Omaha to see my sister again for the second time in two weeks, which I’m very excited for. Late May will see a trip to San Francisco for Citrix Summit and Synergy conferences.

I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to work on the yard and finish prepping it for spring and summer. Hopefully this will not be the last update in months yet again. I will attempt to keep updating and will start trying to use my Picasa web album more to highlight the wonderful things I encounter throughout my day to day live. Here’s to anticipative enthusiasm.

Time is on my side

I don’t go back to work until January 4th. Then, the following week I fly out to Colorado for a week (also work but who’s counting that one). I’m rather excited to see how much stuff I can get done around the house. Weather folks are predicting a dumping of snow on Minnesota over the Christmas week (through Friday) and ice in Iowa (where we’re going for Holly’s folks). Should be interesting. Glad we have life/health/car insurance either way.

Four-Eight

So we got our real measurable snowfall last night of 4-8″. It’s hard to tell exactly how much as we’ve been getting high winds which has been causing drifting. Lily’s rebounding nicely but still, not being very ginger on her foot. After pulling out her stitches, we’ve pretty much been fighting daily battles with trying to get her to not be a dog and run around like crazy.

Application Servers w/Services

So I have some really old application servers. Six in production and the same number in test. Each server has a unique service that must be stopped in a specific order and then the IIS default website stopped before bringing down the servers (for patching, maintenance or whatnot.) Rather than going through the servers one at a time, I decided to create a little script to automate the shutdown, reboot and starting of services for me. Seeing as these are Windows 2000 servers, and the services are non-Microsoft services, they tend to be picky. So I added in a do-while loop to keep attempting to start the services until the service.status equals running. It was a fun Thanksgiving self made project that I’m sure no one will use but was a lot of fun to get working.

Sunday Sunday

Sing it to the tune of Monday Monday by the Mamas and the Papas. Wife just got home from the long Thanksgiving weekend home with her mom and family. I was able to have the dogs stay with me and if they get up to follow me one more time I leave the room I may snap at them. Tomorrow is, unfortunately Monday. Which brings about the ever popular “Is it Friday yet?” One can always hope for more short 3 day weeks. Or the least America could do is to adopt the Spanish siesta. Just think how much better we’d feel with a small nap in the middle of the day. I’d be all for working late if I had a nice decent sized break in the middle. I for one always welcomed a carton of milk, some graham crackers and my own special personal little mat to pass out on.

Friday Zombies

Friday’s almost over. A few hundred more zombies slain. It feels like a perpetual Sunday afternoon right now and I’ve got 2 more days of the weekend. At least that gives me some time to fix some stuff and maybe try to figure out some more scripting. Spent most of the first portion of the day working and then headed over to Jer’s house for a great ham dinner. It really hit the spot. Also watched the movie Push. It was pretty good. I actually rank it higher than Ninja Assassin (which we went and saw yesterday). Both were good ‘shut off your mind and watch’ types of movies so it really was relaxing. The dogs are going nuts. I’ve taken them on a couple walks already but they’re still moping around the house looking for their mama. Soon enough lil’ pups.

New Distribution Lists

Recently I’ve had to create 100+ distribution lists at the same time. Each with a different owner. Rather than create each individual one at a time, I figured I’d throw together a quick Powershell script. It’s a very simple script for those who’re used to scripting languages but it’s my first without help and it just plain works. So I’m happy with it. Note however, you will need the Active Directory PowerPack to create DLs. We are running Exchange 2007 at my work so I also needed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Management Pack to create email enabled DLs.

$file = Import-Csv r:\Test.csv
foreach ($entry in $file) {
$null = New-DistributionGroup -name $entry.name -SamAccountName $entry.SamAccountName -type Distribution -ManagedBy $entry.owner -OrganizationalUnit $entry.Location
Set-QADGroup -Identity $entry.Name -Description ("Owner: " + $entry.owner)
Add-ADPermission -Identity $entry.Name -User $entry.owner -AccessRights "WriteProperty" -ExtendedRights "Self-Membership" -Properties Member -InheritanceType None
}

The greatest thing about Powershell is the logic just makes sense. In line 3, “-name $entry.name” calls to the CSV column named appropriately name. This corresponds directly to Display Name. SamAccountName corresponds to Pre-Windows 2000 name. The rest are self explanatory. See an example of the CSV below.

Shortfuse meets Powershell

Well, I’ll give it one more chance before I give up on blogging all together. I’ve owned 2 websites and barely updated either. Shortfuse being my first, stood the test of time much longer than my short lived, utterly failed last attempt that will go unmentioned. Lately I’ve been digging myself into learning my first scripting language Powershell. I’ll post some of my scripts (edited slightly for work related secrecy) for any of my computer geeks to pick apart or use for themselves. And try to see if I can keep updating this thing again… time’ll tell.