Tag: Automation
Active Directory is awesome, but for it to be effective it needs to be maintained and loved. An important maintenance step is cleanup, which involves removing objects that are no longer in use or required. These include:
- User Accounts
- Computer Objects
- Empty Groups
- Empty Organizational Units (OU)
Recently I wrote a guest article for Adaxes to cleanup Active Directory using PowerShell. Along with all of the details and how-to I developed a complete PowerShell toolkit that cleans up your Active Directory environment for you automatically. These tools can be scheduled and can be configured to search a certain scope, exclude certain types of objects and you can also choose the type of processing you want to do when you find inactive AD objects. The options available are report, disable and\or delete.
All of the details and links to the PowerShell scripts to get you started to cleanup Active Directory are available in the article on the Adaxes blog. Clicking on the title of this post will get you there.
The AWS SDK (for any language) is awesome and very powerful. Everything you can do in the AWS console you can do programatically which is why the AWS platform is so awesome to work with.
Getting started with using the AWS SDK can be a little daunting, so in this article we will be looking installing and configuring the AWS SDK for PowerShell so that you can get straight into automating your AWS environment.
The PowerShell execution policy is a good feature from a security perspective, but in most cases it is just plain annoying, especially when running scripts from Group Policy, Task Scheduler, or some other sort of remote mechanism. This article shows you how to bypass the PowerShell execution policy on a machine so that you can run your script on a system irrespective of what execution policy is set.
Recently I needed to configure all of our 50 or so ESXi hosts to forward SNMP traps to our corporate monitoring solution. This meant enabling and configuring SNMP on each of the hosts. Naturally, I wrote a script for this as 50 hosts is way too many to do manually.
This article shows you how configure SNMP on an ESXi host manually, via PowerCLI and via host profiles.
If you have ever managed a VMware environment that contains virtual machines with RDM (Raw Device Mapping) disks then you will know it is a pain to track and manage RDMs, especially when trying to distinguish which VM has a specific RDM disk attached or if the RDM is still attached to a VM. You will also know that it is nearly impossible to find an RDM (and the corresponding VM) based on RDM’s LUN ID.
To ease the management burden of RDMs, I have written a script to search for a specific RDM by LUN ID or alternatively to get a list of all RDMs, their LUN ID, Capacity, Disk Identifier and the VM they are attached to. Below is the script and all of the details you need to get it up and running in your environment…
Today we will be discussing a topic that I believe is very important and should be at the forefront of consideration for all medium and large IT shops. The topic I am talking about is Automating User Account Provisioning.
In this article we will be making a case for automation by highlighting the common problems IT teams face when tackling account provisioning manually. We then discuss some of the solutions that are available to IT professionals when looking at automating user account provisioning. These solutions range from the do-it-yourself style all the way through to off-the-shelf products that will take care of all of the hard work for you.
For more information, keep on reading…