Tired of seeing What’s happening now? in the Lync client. Sick of seeing the same old status update because you or your colleagues never pulled down that holiday message or #GoHawks update? Well, I was sick of it. I wanted a quick and dirty way to automate updating the Lync status message (aka ProfileNote).
After hours of scouring the internet and messing with multiple twitter libraries and outdated twitter code, I ran across this gem by Github: MyTwitter.psm1. While it was meant to post to twitter, a bit of hacking and this was born. Coupled with some other Lync Client work I’ve done, I had a workable solution.
I regularly bounce around on different networks and vpn connections. I got tired of manually setting the location in Lync and found myself just ignoring it altogether. After doing some poking around, I decided to throw a powershell script together to just do the dirty work for me.
The script uses Telize for geoip data and DNSOMatic Telize for the external IP. The script requires the Microsoft.Lync.Model.dll from the Lync 2013 SDK (15.0.4603.1000 as of this post). You can find the Lync Client 2013 SDK here.
The IT ecosystem is rich with network monitoring systems (NMS). Each NMS has different capabilities, costs, and purposes in life. It is commonplace for me to come into a business that has invested in an NMS that doesn’t fit all their needs. You might ask, “What does this have to do with creating a Windows service?” Here is the scenario that brought this up.
A client has a monitoring solution for their Windows servers and some basic network up/down stats. Their internet connection had been flaky for a month or two. As we worked with their ISP, their connection continued to stay up but latency would spike and often drop packets. The monitoring never sees the link as down but the level of service is degraded and mostly unusable. The ISP can quickly reset the ports and fix the issue, but we want to know right when this happens to minimize downtime.
In a recent incident, an Exchange server had a complete volume failure during testing. Exchange 2010 was reinstalled but when installing Service Pack 1, it failed upgrading the Mailbox Role. Upon reviewing the log, I found the following line:
Database is mandatory on UserMailbox. Property Name: Database The error doesn’t explain the problem very well but it is basically saying that there is a UserMailbox without a database, which should never happen. The failure of the volume and subsequent reinstall of 2010 left the arbitration mailboxes (and one or two user mailboxes) orphaned. Most of the suggestions to resolve this problem list doing things like deleting the system mailboxes and running “setup.com /PrepareAD”. After looking around, I was able to parse together a few other options and find a fix.
Twice in the past two weeks, I have come across Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 migrations which went uncompleted. In both cases, I received the following error(s) when trying to view the properties of a recipient with spaces in its alias or when viewing the properties of the offline address book:
The properties on have invalid data. If you click OK, default values will be used instead and will be saved if you do not change them before hitting Apply or OK on the property page. If you click cancel, the object will be displayed read-only and corrupted values will be retained. The following values have invalid data: Alias. WARNING: Object has been corrupted and it is in an inconsistent state. The following validation errors have been encountered: WARNING: is not valid for Alias. Set- : is not valid for Alias. Exchange 2003 would allow an administrator to put spaces in the Alias attribute. That poses a problem for 2007 which is strict about the characters it allows in this attribute. In Exchange 2007 the following characters are considered valid: Strings formed with characters from a to z (uppercase or lowercase), digits from 0 to 9, !, #, $, %, &, ‘, *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, {, |, } or ~. But, no spaces.
I was asked to get a baseline for generating reports within AD. The two important pieces of information which were required to generate these reports were the ip address and FQDN of each domain controller. The script would then connect to each individual system to gather data. While I was at it, I added the MAC Address just to see what other pieces of data would be useful out of the Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration class.
I was recently asked to get a quick report of all Windows 7 computers within a multi-domain AD forest. After banging my head into the keyboard for a while, I finally figured it out. The script below should do the trick.
Also, if you use the OperatingSystemVersion attribute, you will find that Server 2008 R2 shares version “6.1 (7600)". So, the best way to find Windows 7 only, is to search for “Windows 7*” with the wildcard character against the OperatingSystem attribute. That will ensure all Windows 7 versions are returned and will exclude Server 2008 R2 from your results.