A late one for this release of ‘from around the web’ after being on holiday for the last week – as the case always seems to be I’ve come out of the sun quite red. This week we have another step in the right direction to getting rid of passwords, some helpful templates for building a first config for a… Read more
Tag: Active Directory
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
Fun with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a powerful tool that comes with any of the paid editions of SQL server. By design its main function is to extract, transform and load data into databases however by mixing in CSV exports and PowerShell commands it can help automate various workflows. Although I won’t delve into too much detail in this… Read more
Looking back on setting up a Moodle install – Introduction
The past few weeks at work have been filled up with going from what has been a very successful pilot of Moodle 2.6 to a fully featured install of Moodle 2.7.1. Hopefully as time allows I’ll be able to get out some posts about how each aspect of Moodle goes down with the staff and students but for now this… Read more
Network Deployed Printers are not appearing in Directory
For a few days I’ve found that printers that have been published in Active Directory (from our 2008 R2 printer server) were not appearing in the directory or find printers tabs (see above). With about 120 printers deployed and only 5 showing up there had to be something wrong. As it turns out the Printer Service was starting before the… Read more
Extending the AD Schema for end user recovery – System Centre Data Protection Manager
For a long time we’ve been using the built in features of Windows Server to allow users to recover their own work through the ‘Previous Versions’ tab in Windows Explorer (which works on the Volume Snapshot service) however the long term plan has been to get our DPM 2012 server to do the heavy lifting instead. When trying to extend… Read more
Moodle and LDAP authentication – login doesn’t work!
When setting up a new Moodle install with LDAP authentication I was finding that my test users wen’t able to login with the normal Active Directory user name/password (sAMAccountName). After a little playing I found that they could login fine if they used what is known as the container name (cn). After a little digging it turns out this is… Read more