Recorded: December 23rd, 2009
Your Host: Steve Murawski and Keith Albright
Show Length: 1:19:14

Before you acquire power, you must acquire knowledge – and Quest Software has what you need! In Jeffery Hicks’ e-book, “Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell,” learn how PowerShell helps you master local accounts and groups, password management, security and permissions and much, much more. You’ll also learn about the PowerShell extras and out-of-the-box features that will help you control Active Directory.

Don’t wait – register for your free copy of Jeffery’s book, and see why PowerShell and Quest Power GUI are the ultimate Windows management tools.

Topics/Links:

• Best (and Worts) Operating Systems of the last ten years
• Making a product Sysadmin friendly
• Application Permissions = Profile Problem (Link to LUA; a tool to troubleshoot)
• RemoteApp for Hyper-V
• DNS Resource Records - What is a good use for them?
• Google DNS
• Blue Collar and White Collar admins

Read the full show notes here.

Read the live UStream.tv chat log here.

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Previously, I’ve been in control of the environment that I have been monitoring, so I was able to integrate that performance monitoring into PolyMon.  Now that I have a slightly different scenario, I’ve had to modify my performance monitoring strategy.

I’ve mainly been concerned about general server performance, as well as IIS and SQL performance (Basic, IIS, SQL 2005, IIS and SQL 2005), so I’ve been using counter sets that mirror that.

Then I wrapped a couple of calls to logman.exe, which is the command line interface to PerfMon counters.

To create the counter, I used

logman create counter BlackBox -v mmddhhmm -cf Counters.txt -si 00:10 -f bincirc -o “c:\Perflogs\Blackbox_%computername%” -max 250

which creates a counter named “BlackBox” (like a flight recorder).

The command also:

• reads in the counters from a text file (see my examples above). 
• sets the sample interval to be every 10 minutes (“-si”).
• sets the log file is a binary circular file (set by the ‘”-f”), which would be a maximum of 250 MB (set by “–max”)
• sets the log file location and name (using the computer name environmental variable to append the computer name to the log file) and the “-v” option also adds the month, day, hour, and minute of the start of the log to the file name.

After creating the counter, I used

to start the capture of the counter information.

Finally, I have another command to stop the capture, so when there is an issue or after a specified period of monitoring, I can grab the log file and feed it to PAL or load it in PerfMon (on Server 2008 or greater – as PerfMon got some nice feature bumps with the more recent releases) and analyze it there or export it to a CSV file to slice into it with Excel.

Have Fun!

Resources:

Runas Radio Shows -

• Stephen Choy
• Shane Creamer
• Clint Huffman

Technet Article – Taking Your Server’s Pulse

PAL – Performance Analysis Of Logs

Recorded: December 16th, 2009
Your Host: Steve Murawski, Rich Niemeier and Keith Albright
Show Length: 1:23:21

Before you acquire power, you must acquire knowledge – and Quest Software has what you need! In Jeffery Hicks’ e-book, “Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell,” learn how PowerShell helps you master local accounts and groups, password management, security and permissions and much, much more. You’ll also learn about the PowerShell extras and out-of-the-box features that will help you control Active Directory.

Don’t wait – register for your free copy of Jeffery’s book, and see why PowerShell and Quest Power GUI are the ultimate Windows management tools.

Topics/Links:

• New Milwaukee area Script Club
• End Users taking storage needs into their own hands
• WIX - Windows Installer XML
• ATT and the Boy Scouts
• Powershell - one cmdlet at a time
• Creative way to manage friendships
• PAL for performance monitoring
• Data gathering for crime prevention - When does it impinge on your right to privacy?

Read the full show notes here.

Read the live UStream.tv chat log here.

Website Picks

Rich - Track Santa with NORAD

Keith - Muppets sing Bohemian Rhapsody

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Recorded: December 9th, 2009
Your Host: Rich Niemeier and Keith Albright
Show Length: 57:14

Before you acquire power, you must acquire knowledge – and Quest Software has what you need! In Jeffery Hicks’ e-book, “Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell,” learn how PowerShell helps you master local accounts and groups, password management, security and permissions and much, much more. You’ll also learn about the PowerShell extras and out-of-the-box features that will help you control Active Directory.

Don’t wait – register for your free copy of Jeffery’s book, and see why PowerShell and Quest Power GUI are the ultimate Windows management tools.

Topics/Links:

• Microsoft Terminal Services or Remote Desktop Services Licensing changes
• Using thin clients more often
• Short term thinking - Why change a software package if it’s working?
• More users requesting remote access
• Stopping games on Windows desktops
• Google’s Chrome OS
• Reunion Website rip-off rant

Read the full show notes here.

Read the live UStream.tv chat log here.

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Rich - NetBootDisk.com - Old fashioned floppy boot disk

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Recorded: December 2, 2009
Your Host: Steve Murawski and Keith Albright
Show Length: 1:11:57

Topics/Links:

• Modules Make PowerShell even better. Some links to start experimenting:
  • BSonPosh
  • PowerShell Pack
  • PoshCode
• Power Supply & UPS incompatibility problem
• Microsoft being helpful?
• ClearWire Wi-Max testing
• Where to get PowerShell V2
• IP Camera Software block X-Windows. Don’t just choose ports at random!
• Dynatrace - Exploring Internet Explorer
• NTDETECT problem on laptop
• PowerShell and Crystal Reports
• IT Admin loses job searching for aliens

Read the full show notes here.

Read the live UStream.tv chat log here.

Website Picks

Sorry - none this week.

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