New Rig Specs

So I'm building a new PC and decided to record the specs;

Fractal Design Define R4 Arctic White with Window
Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SOC Force LGA 1150 Motherboard
Intel Core i5 4670K Quad Core LGA 1150 3.4GHz CPU Processor
Corsair Vengeance Pro 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 2133MHz Memory
Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5" SATA III SSD MZ-7TE250BW
Seasonic P-860XP Platinum Series 860W Power Supply
Thermaltake Water 3.0 Pro Liquid CPU Cooler
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB WindForce 3X Video Card

It's going to be pretty special when it's done.

The CPU will be replaced by a Devils Canyon i7 once they become available.

It's my first foray into liquid cooling but using an all in one unit kinda makes it a more approachable concept.

Update! - Here are some photos from the build

Everyday Powershell - Part 20 - Rollback system time and launch a program

So there are times where loading an older application requires you to rollback the date of your system. Our UPS management console has had this odd requirement since 2014. So we threw this together to make life a little easier;

set-date 01/01/2009 Start-Process "c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe" Start-sleep 15 set-date (invoke-command -ComputerName SOMECURRENTTIMESERVER -ScriptBlock {get-date})

You can update the process path in the second line, then save this as a .ps1 file and use it as a shortcut to launch time-bombed applications.

It does require the appropriate permissions on the sever we get the time from in the fourth line. It'll also need Powershell Remoting enabled.

Everyday Powershell - Part 19 - Migrate Transport Rules from Exchange 2007 to 2013

Today's script is a quick and dirty fix for a project we're in the middle of. Not really a script either, but it's the thought that counts.

#on a computer with exchange 2007 management tools Add-PSSnapin *exchange* export-transportrulecollection c:\scripts\exch2007transportrules.xml #on a computer with exchange 2013 management tools Add-PSSnapin *exchange* [Byte[]]$Data = Get-Content -Path '\\someserver\c$\Scripts\exch2007transportrules.xml' -Encoding Byte -ReadCount 0 Import-TransportRuleCollection -FileData $Data

Export transport rules from Exchange 2007 and import them to 2013. 

To think our System Admin was going to copy these over by hand!

Full credit to Microsoft for this one it is all from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2846555

Everyday Powershell - Part 18 - Set Address Details in Active Directory

Here's a request from one of our readers. He's tidying up a negelected AD he inherited and needed a way to apply consistent addresses to his AD User Objects.

Powershell is great at this stuff! We've decided to use group membership as a way to decide who should get what data, but this could be easily applied via OU.

<# For this to work setup a CSV in C:\Scripts call it Groups.csv And fill it with data like this;  SecurityGroup,Address,City,Zip,State,Country,Telephone Group1,1 Some St,SomeTown,1122,SOMESTATE,AU,615551234 Group2,2 Some Other St,SomeOtherTown,2211,SOMESTATE,AU,615554321 #> $csvdata =import-csv C:\Scripts\Groups.csv foreach($row in $csvdata) {     $users= Get-ADGroupMember $row.securitygroup     foreach($user in $users)     {         Set-ADUser $user -StreetAddress $row.Address -city $row.city -State $row.State -Postalcode $row.Zip -Country $row.Country -OfficePhone $row.Telephone     } }

Just a simple script with two loops, first one iterates through the rows in the CSV the second group steps through each user in the security group identified in the initial loop.

Nothing fancy but it fixed our readers problem. Such is the power of the shell!

Everyday Powershell - Part 17 - Using new-mailboxexportrequest with NON-US dates

Here's a crazy making problem!

The new-mailboxexportrequest commandlet will only accept dates in US formats. Roland Paix has made this post about the issue. The conclusion is switch your culture to EN-US before loading powershell. Sooo frustrating! But hey, something has to be the default datetime and Microsoft is an American company. No point getting emotional, let's just fix it.

Here's a neat trick you can use to set the Culture of the "Current Thread" you are running.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Threading") [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Globalization") [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::CreateSpecificCulture("en-us") Add-PSSnapin *exchange* $start = (get-date).adddays(-28) $end = (get-date).adddays(-14) $filter = "(Received -gt '"+$start+"') -and (Received -lt '"+$end+"')" new-Mailboxexportrequest -mailbox SOMEMAILBOX -ContentFilter $filter -filepath C:\SOME.pst

This should trick new-mailboxexportrequest into believing that your dates are in the "correct" format!

Everyday Powershell - Part 16 - Monitoring Disk Performance in Powershell

Welcome back to another Everyday Powershell post. It's not powershell we POST every day, it's powershell you could USE everyday.

Today we look at get-counter which you should have a fiddle with if you get the chance. It does a lot more than what we've used it for here. But this may help you get the gist of running performance counters in powershell.

$disks = Get-WmiObject win32_logicaldisk | Where-Object {$_.DriveType -eq 3} | select DeviceID $report = @() $i=1 foreach ($disk in $disks) {     Write-Progress -Activity "Mesuring disk performance" -Status $disk.DeviceID -PercentComplete (($i/$disks.Count)*100)     $temp = "" | select Disk, Read, Write     $temp.disk = $disk.deviceid     $counter = "\LogicalDisk(" + ($disk.deviceid) + ")\Avg. Disk sec/Read"     $temp.read = ((Get-Counter -Counter $counter).CounterSamples.cookedvalue)*1000     $counter = "\LogicalDisk(" + ($disk.deviceid) + ")\Avg. Disk sec/Write"     $temp.write = ((Get-Counter -Counter $counter).CounterSamples.cookedvalue)*1000     $report += $temp     $i++ } $report

We've included the now ubiquitous write-progess to give a useful progress indicator. As well as the old $temp="" | select which sets up a hash table for us to dump data into.

Everyday Powershell Returns! - Find exchange mailbox size

Fresh from an ass kicking at the Winter Scripting games we're back with another useful bit of Powershell!

We're building our Exchange 2013 environment now and have a burning need to see what our users mailboxes look like, in terms of the space they consume.

This little script did the trick for us and helped us plan our new information store layout.

Add-PSSnapin *exchange* $users = Get-ADUser -searchbase "DC=somedomain,DC=com" -Filter * -Properties department $report = @() $count = $users.count $i = 0 foreach ($user in $users) {     $i++     $prog = ($i/$count) * 100     Write-Progress -Activity "Processing..." -percentcomplete $prog -CurrentOperation $user.samaccountname      $temp = ""| select Person, mailboxsize, itemcount, Team, Function     $mailboxstats = Get-MailboxStatistics $user.samaccountname     $temp.person = $user.samaccountname     $temp.mailboxsize = $mailboxstats.totalitemsize.value.toMB()     $temp.itemcount = $mailboxstats.itemcount     $temp.team = $user.department     $report += $temp } $report

Should be pretty self explanatory. Ask a question in the comments if you'd like clarification of anything.