With the continued rise of ‘Next Generation’ Anti-Virus like Sophos Intercept X and PaloAlto Traps the question from many SysAdmins might be well how do I deploy these? If you are looking at Intercept X and you already are Running Sophos Central (with Endpoint Protection) the simple answer is a press a few buttons in the Admin Console. In short,… Read more
Category: Software
This section looks at what is new in the world of software (Operating Systems included) and how to take best advantage of what is out there.
PowerShell script to download an RSS feed and alert when there are new posts
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
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
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
Gemalto Mini-Driver Manager change Admin Key options
If you are looking for a free tool to manage some of the more intricate features of the Gemalto IDPrime .NET and MD cards then the Mini-Driver Manager (downloadable from http://www.gemalto.com/products/dotnet_card/resources/development.html) may well fit the bill. However it has one small downfall in that out of the box it only allows you to manage cards with the Admin Key set… Read more
Setting PIN complexity on a Gemalto IDPrime Smart Card
So after meaning to play with Smart Cards in greater detail for some time we’ve just received a set of cards and accessories from Smartcard Focus (http://www.smartcardfocus.com/) including…. Gemalto GemPC Shell Token V2 (IDBridge K30) (a USB dongle style Smart Card reader which you can see in the screen shot sequence below) Gemalto IDPrime .NET smartcard – SIM cut (to… Read more
Deploy Sibelius 8 Sounds with MDT 2013
So first things first….the title of this article is misleading; thus far Avid do not seem to have released a sounds pack specific for Sibelius 8 as you will see on the website when you login in (https://my.avid.com/account/orientation) the only option is for the 7.5 sounds pack. But…this works! Now deploying Sibelius it’s self in a silent manner is (in my… Read more
Powershell Function to prevent a script from continuing if a Domain Controller is offline
One of those monthly jobs that every SysAdmin will come across is good old Patch Tuesday; to help make Patch Tuesday a little more fun after all of the servers have been updated I use Hyper-V Replica (run by a PowerShell script) to shutdown each Virtual Machine and move it onto another host (ticks the box for the machine reboot… Read more
MDT does not apply WSUS updates
A silly gotcha more than anything else…. after recently updating my WSUS server to use SSL (to allow publishing through the firewall) I noticed my clients that were deployed with MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) were not installing updates as part of the Task Sequence; indeed the message log at the end indicated that the updates could not be downloaded as… Read more
PRTG Push Notifications to Microsoft Band 2 from Windows Phone
Its been a day or so since buying a Microsoft Band 2 (took a while to find a high street shop that had one to try on in the first place!) and its proving rather useful to me as a person who rarely has his phone turned on loud and really never notices the little vibrations from it. My most… Read more