One of my favourite features of PowerShell is the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet which (among a great many other things) can download the data from an RSS feed. One application I’ve found for this is to stay on top of security bulletins from organisations like Adobe and Drupal. However just downloading the data from the feed and kicking it out in an… Read more
Author: James
When shutting down a Hyper-V virtual machine the Hyper-V replication state goes to critical
For the past few months I’ve been using an in house script to manage the rebooting of Virtual Machines on Hyper-V hosts following Windows Updates. These Virtual Machines also take part in Hyper-V Replica Replication to a DR host. On occasion I’ve spotted that when shutting down (as part of the reboot sequence) the Hyper-V Replica state will go into… Read more
HP Color LaserJet CP3505 Printer, after IP address change will not print
While carrying out the steps to move our network devices from a flat network to one with purposeful VLANs I had changed the IP address of one of our HP CP3505 printers (using the web based management console) to discover that with the new IP I could not print to the printer over the network. Oddly enough the web based… Read more
Synology DiskStation as a Backup Target for Windows PCs and Macs
As some readers may know I currently work in Higher Education and while all of the business data is trivial to backup providing any level of backup service to students and academics is significantly harder. The challenges faced include the myriad of Operating Systems in use (Windows/OSX/Linux), the fact that the devices being backed up are inherently ‘untrusted’ (i.e. owned by the… Read more
Flashing lights and HPE ProCurve/Aruba Switches (chassislocate)
When working with a lab full of HPE ProCurve/Aruba switches (or you just want to know who is who in a stack of switches) the chassislocate CLI command comes in really handy by either blinking or holding solid the blue locator light. See the screenshots below for a little more info. ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
Aruba (by HPE) 2920s – pictures
It’s that magical time of the year where…new network switches arrive! Given that the new Aruba branding has taken full control of what was ProCurve I thought I should post some photos of the new paintwork. Happy to say the colour black isn’t half bad! Included in the images are J9729A 2920-48G-PoE+ J9728A 2920-48G J9731A 2920 2-Port 10Gbe SFP+ Module… Read more
Two super useful keyboard shortcuts in PowerShell ISE
So this post is a more a reminder to me than anything else but…having recently come across the Microsoft TechNet article ‘Keyboard Shortcuts for the Windows PowerShell ISE’ (https://msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/scripting/core-powershell/ise/keyboard-shortcuts-for-the-windows-powershell-ise) I thought it necessary to highlight the two keyboard shortcuts…. Ctrl + J – brings up a list of code snippet templates (e.g. try-catch-finally and do-until) Ctrl + M – expand or… Read more
Clients not updating from WSUS – Code 8024400E
1 Image 1 of 3 Error 8024400E appears on the clients… After recently deploying a Windows Server 2012 R2 WSUS server (afraid we couldn’t wait much longer for 2016 (which is now out by the way!)) we started seeing Error 8024400E on our clients and servers (from 2008R2/Windows 7 to Server 2012 R2/Windows 10). As it transpires Microsoft published KB3159706 for… Read more
Upgrading MySQL Community Server from 5.1 to 5.5 on Windows
In this guide I’ll show a ‘working’ method to upgrade from MySQL Server 5.1 to 5.5 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. In this case MySQL Server 5.1 was installed by the Microsoft Web Platform Installer some time ago, however this version doesn’t deliver very good performance (and its horribly outdated!) so it was time to get it replaced. The… Read more
Server Room – The latest
Work is coming along nicely with the Server Room, we’ve now removed the last Cisco switch from our infrastructure and the HP 5400R series switch is deployed replacing the 2530 that was in its place; over time we’ll be bringing more fibre from our edge switches into this room as well hence the number of SFP+ ports on the 5400R…. Read more