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Being an IT administrator involves more than just answering tickets and checking backups. A good IT administrator will be proactively seeking knowledge to become more valuable and efficient for his employer. One way to accomplish this is to become certified. Over the next several month I will work towards my MCSA for Windows Server 2016.… Continue reading Path to MCSA for Windows 2016

Hello, again… With security risks caused by having outdated and vulnerable versions of Java and Firefox, it’s important you maintain the latest vendor releases. Here’s a short snippet of PS that will query that information for you to compare to your AD computers: $firefox = get-weburl -url “https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/” -Content | fl * | findstr “releasenotes”… Continue reading Query current versions of Firefox and Java from Internet.

Adding, removing, or modifying AD users are the most common tasks of any Windows administrator. Having a well defined Powershell script makes this job much easier and consistent. Okay, users my rough version of the new user: # Description: Creates a new AD user in OU=Office Users,OU=Everett Users,DC=Corp,DC=local Takes the like user and adds new… Continue reading Powershell AD administrator – adding a new user.

Platform: Windows 2012 Module Required: activedirectory Here are some quick and dirty ways to find locked out, disabled, expired, expiring, inactive, locked out, password expired, password never expires. Using Get-Aduser with a little more scripting get-aduser -filter * -properties * | select-object name, @{name=”lastlogon”;expression={[datetime]::fromfiletime($_.lastlogon)}} | s ort-object lastlogon The rest of the examples are from… Continue reading Managing ADSI Users with PowerShell

It’s procedural for us to come up with resolutions for the New Year. Being a Windows administrator, RDP is a common way to carry out many tasks that now are fully compatibly with Powershell. If you are still running on an older version of Windows Server, e.g., Windows 2003, please just upgrade! My resolution is… Continue reading 2018 New Years Resolutions?

Github.com is a widely used source control and storage service for programmers novice to expert. Github is also free and includes 1GB of storage with 1GB of data transfer per month. Github.com is the antithesis of arcane when it comes to source control with programmers. It is the most widely used service for source control.… Continue reading Getting started with a free Github.com account.

This post is not a technical post with details on installing or troubleshooting Nagios, you can use Google for doing that much. This post is a short synopsis of what you need to get started with Nagios. Our budget for IT doesn’t include overhead for purchasing fancy network monitoring tools like Microsoft’s System Center. This… Continue reading Inexpensively monitoring a network with more than 100 workstations and many servers.

Being a good administrator for a small to medium size company means being able to restore data when requested. Your first job as an administrator is to make sure that all important data is being backed up and verified per requirement. This should be well documented and approved by your superiors. Making sure someone besides… Continue reading Testing your disaster recovery preparedness.

The most common tasks a Windows administrator has is to remotely access their server. This is simplified by Microsoft providing a couple RDP licenses. It’s so easy, but can just as easily open up vulnerabilities to your entire network. Here are a few things to consider: There are automated systems always scanning for port 3389,… Continue reading Best practices for remotely accessing servers for a small business.