Believe it or not, this little gem is one I learned over 20 years ago now when I worked for AST Computers. We had a need to exercise some hard drives and one of the tech team there wrote this quick but simple batch file to do so. Copy the following lines to Notepad and then save it as a file called t.bat. Copy t.t + t.t t1.t del t.t ren t1.t t.t dir … [Read more...]
PowerShell Tip #3 – Filtering Output
When you issue PowerShell commands you can get quite a bit of information back from it. Last weeks tip showed how to format the output and to do a very basic filter to show specific columns only. Today we’ll be a little more specific. Lets say that I wanted to list all the processes on a computer where the Process Name begins with svc* – this is how I would … [Read more...]
PowerShell Tip #2 – Formatting Output
Whilst PowerShell is really cool, you can also get way too much information in response to commands. I was onsite recently and working on an issue where I needed to compare the output of a few servers with specific parameters. The best way to do that is to document the configuration settings for the few key parameters you want to compare and then check for the … [Read more...]
Powershell Tip #1 – Handling Services on a Computer
I’m doing more and more with Powershell and whilst I’m no programmer, I’m going to post a few tips that I find along the way that make it easy to deal with things. Todays tip is about Services and how to handle them. Here are a few that I’ve used today whilst onsite doing work for a client to deal with their servers service configurations. We needed to stop … [Read more...]
How can I make SBS 2008 shutdown and reboot faster?
SBS 2008 has an awful lot running on it. It’s not surprise therefore when you find that it takes quite some time to shutdown the server. I’ve seen my own server take 15 to 20 minutes to do a shutdown. The secret to understand is what goes on during the shutdown process. The shutdown process is the reverse of the startup process. What I mean by this … [Read more...]