Peter Van Eeckhoutte's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘script’

Introduction

The title of this post may be a bit misleading – synchronizing multiple account domains to a single domain or forest is not limited to Exchange. There may be other reasons (e.g. Identity Management solution) that require you to replicate users from multiple domains into a single domain/forest, or even ADAM instance.

In this blog post, I will show you a possible IIFP implementation that has some specific requirements. In my scenario, IIFP will be used to replicate user objects from multiple account domains into one centralized resource forest, and it will be used replicate back the “mail” and “proxyAddresses” attributes from the Resource Forest to the account domains.  Furthermore, I also need to replicate user objects from a domain that is not used for authenticate users or link mailboxes to, but merely to add the users as contacts in the …

Microsoft has implemented a really neat feature in Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate, allowing you to perform a full disk or even system backup, while the system is running. This new backup tool used Block Level backup and uses Volume Shadow Copy to backup open files (however, it is advised to close your applications while running the backup, this will certainly speed up the process a little, and will make sure your backup is more accurate)    Before looking at the details of performing a disk or system backup, there are a number of things you need to know    1. You can only backup a disk or the entire system (all disks). You cannot backup …

One of the reasons why the company I work at has taken the decision to implement Operations Manager is because the daily task to go through a pile of interfacing and backup log files became too time consuming and demotivating for the people involved. Armed with Operations Manager and a basic vbscript, I have set up a couple of monitors that now have automated the entire process. These are the components that I have set up in order to get it to work : I created a vbscript that parses to one or more robocopy log files. The only real limitation of the script in its current form is that it only goes through the first set of robocopy output in the log …

Every admin knows by now that using Active Directory as the central authentication database allows for a lot of possibilities in terms of user account and security management. Keeping internal as well as external users in one and the same AD might be a good idea if you have a lot of external people (partners, support contracts, …) that need to connect to resources in your network, whether it is remote (via vpn) or on-site. However, these people are external people, and you might need to control those user accounts (because of legislation regulations or just because that’s a good idea). One of the options is to disable those user accounts every day. As the number of users and groups grows, this can become a challenging and annoying …

Today, I will try to explain 2 techniques that will allow you to backup your vmdk files (virtual machines) on a VMWare ESX 3.0.x server. My lab runs on 3.0.2, but this will work on 3.0.1 (and maybe earlier versions) as well. Before continuing, let’s make a couple of assumptions :

I will explain how to backup the virtual machines to another location on the SAN. Although one of the scripts that will be explained in this document will allow you to backup using 3rd party software or copy the files over the network to another server (using NFS, FTP, SMB, …), I’m not going to explain that because I don’t use commercial 3rd party software myself. Furthermore, I’m sure you can figure out how to backup the backup copy yourself
We will backup machines while they are powered on. There’s …