When your application makes connections to remote computers, it is usually a good idea to check to see if the remote machine is up and responding prior to attempting a connection to it. Pinging a machine is one way to do it. Visual Basic 6 doesn’t have a built in method to perform an ICMP echo request (ie,… Read More »
By default, new distribution groups in Exchange 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 do accept messages from outside of the Exchange organization. In some cases, this may not be the desired behavior.
Using the ping command to test for responses from network computers is a quick way to see if a network path is open between two hosts. Not in depth, but basic. Here is how to get a list of servers from Active Directory, and ping them with PowerShell.
As a server administrator, one of my duties is to review log files for anomolous behavior, errors, or other issues. For me, combining all the daily logs into one big file is much easier to review.
Welcome to the final piece of the puzzle: displaying our metrics. We now have a pile of bits in our database, and now it needs to be displayed in a meaningful way. As you may recall from the previous parts of this series, we first built a PowerShell script which gathers information from the local machine. Using the… Read More »
Programmatically creating an new Windows Event Viewer log can be quite useful during automated processes. While some folks know how this is done, others might needs some guidance. Here’s how to do it with PowerShell.
PSMetrics Part 3: A simple ASP ingestor Welcome to part 3 in the PSMetrics series. In this part, I’ll be building a simple ingestor to receive and process data from the collectors, and send the data on to the database.
Welcome back for part 2 of the series. In this post, I’ll be putting together a simple collector script with PowerShell for gathering metrics on a Windows host, and sending the data to the ingestor.
Metrics are a necessary evil in the IT world. A good set of metrics helps us to diagnose problems in our environments and plan for future growth.
Sometimes, you need to tattle on a user to their manager. But how to find out who their manager is, and their email address? Here is how I did it with PowerShell. At my job, stale user accounts are not tolerated. Inactive accounts are disabled after a period of time, with no warning. However, I wanted to at… Read More »