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Category Archives: Technology
SOLVED: Yum 503 Service Unavailable
This post was an absolute life save, Yum was being blocked by our application aware firewall Palo Alto
Powershell Speaking Clock
After a phone system upgrade we were unable to get the speaking clock within the office, which started off a conversation about how much it costs to call, presently 50p per call in the UK.
A little conversation and it seemed like it would be fairly easy to knock up a system that provided the same service.
So with about 15 minutes I did 😀
https://github.com/mikedixson/PSpeakingClock/
SOLVED: Windows DHCP – Search for a MAC Address
This is a super succinct method of finding a mac address on a Window s DHCP server: https://thewayeye.net/2016/10/8/find-a-mac-microsoft-dhcp
Get-DhcpServerv4Scope | Get-DhcpServerv4Lease -EA SilentlyContinue -ClientId xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xxSOLVED: Windows does not have enough information to verify the certificate
Problem
When moving from one ADFS server to another I imported a full certificate chain and private key into Machine certs on the new Windows 2016.
The certificate displayed fine and chain is complete.
However viewing the certificate properties via ADFS the certificate information gives the error “Windows does not have enough information to verify the certificate”
Solution
Move the intermediate certificate to the Intermediate Certificate Authorities > Certificates store
It seems stupidly obvious in retrospect but Windows itself could view the cert fine, and the import was done via Machine Certificates so you’d think it would put things in the right place.
[Solved] WDS Driver Filters Not Working
Like many people it seems I’ve been scratching my head as to why WDS’s Driver Package Filters were not matching my hardware when imaging a machine that I’d created a driver package group for.
After looking at Greg Shields technet post I was convinced I just needed to grab the model name straight off of the machine type beforehand via a powershell WMI get and I’d be laughing. Alas this still did not work.
I found the best way was to enable the Debug log on WDS, then pull the info directly from what WDS was seeing and use that to create the filters.
I’ve also written a powershell script to pull the details from the debug log as otherwise it takes a fair bit of time.
I’ve posted this here:
https://github.com/mikedixson/Get-SMBios-Strings-From-WDS
Powershell list all properties of an object
Some powershell get commands only output a handful of the object properties get-CalendarProcessing being one such command, than returns just one property.
To get all properties of an object you can pipe to format-list *
get-CalendarProcessing -identity [email protected] | Format-List *
If you know the specific attribute you are after you can still access this variable using select-object.
get-CalendarProcessing -Identity [email protected] | Select-Object AllowConflicts
Get Boot Time For all computers in an OU – Powershell
I wrote the following script enumerates an OU and then looks up the last boot time for each computer.
https://github.com/mikedixson/GetLastBootTimeFromOU
Note: I’m starting to put any scripts I write on GitHub, this will make it easier for you copy down and easier for me to keep any scripts up to date.
Easy GPO Audit Using Powershell
After poking around the Group Policy Objects (GPO) of an infrastructure that was new to me I needed a decent way of producing a quick and useful report on the state of the GPOs.
Because the ComputerVersion and UserVersion numbers are listed as two figures, one for AD and one for Sysvol just an export-csv of get-gpo left me with blank ComputerVersion and UserVersion.
I found this post:Â https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/551588-get-gpo-userversion-and-computerversion-troubles
By using the following powershell I was able to within minutes provide useful information on the state of the GPOs.
get-gpo -all | select Displayname,ID,Description,GPOStatus,CreationTime,ModificationTime,@{Label="ComputerVersion";Expression={$_.computer.dsversion}},@{Label="UserVersion";Expression={$_.user.dsversion}}| export-csv gpo-audit.csv
A small bit of conditional formatting later and we can see that the Domain GPO has a large amount of user setting edits and should be split into a user only GPO and a computer GPO (I won’t go into where these GPOs should be linked at this stage).
SOLVED: False cursor position when entering and editing text in a cell in Excel
Similar to this article I was experiencing a false cursor position and the cursor position and text shifting when editing versus when viewing the cell
I played with the formatting and found that enabled LTR (Left to right formatting) helped, at least made it usable to edit the cell.
However I found the solution for me was to change the font!! Somehow the font the problem cell had become formatted as MS Shell DG font (a font I can’t actually see in the font browser now).
Changing the cell’s font back to the default Calibri resolved the issue!
I’m running Version 1708 (Build 8431.2131 Click-to-Run)