You can now schedule and manage EC2 snapshots from the AWS console. No longer is it necessary to script this out. How's this done? At a high level, You can create a policy to snapshot every 12 or 24 hours based on a tag, setting the number of snapshots to retain. Enable policy, tag instances … Continue reading AWS Snapshot Lifecycle Policies- Finally!
Grepping & RegEx Patterns for Log Filtering in Linux
RegEx, or Regular Expressions, are critical in being able to parse through logs at the CLI. Here are a few examples for different scenarios: Line starts with.... The ^ denotes the beginning of a line. Many logs begin with a timestamp, so if you want to filter lines for a specific date, this works. grep … Continue reading Grepping & RegEx Patterns for Log Filtering in Linux
Migrating SYSVOL replication from FRS to DFSR
With Windows Server 2016 version 1709, FRS replication for SYSVOL is deprecated and you must migrate to DFSR. Fortunately, there is a lot of documentation on how to do this. This is the best article I've come across, as it spells out all of the locations in the registry and ADSI, etc to confirm health … Continue reading Migrating SYSVOL replication from FRS to DFSR
Thoughts on AWS GuardDuty
I recently deployed AWS GuardDuty for a client and wanted to share some thoughts on the services at a high level. If unfamiliar, GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior by evaluating VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail and DNS Logs (if using AWS DNS). The Good A single click … Continue reading Thoughts on AWS GuardDuty
Creating Local Accounts in Powershell
Ok, creating a user account with Powershell- what's interesting about this? Well, let's take a look: It's noteworthy to point-out that you need to convert the password to a secure string. Otherwise, you'll end up with a error like this: A secure string is required for a password creation. If you're creating the account interactively, … Continue reading Creating Local Accounts in Powershell
PS One-Liner: Pull Dell Service Tag
Every now and then, I'll need to pull the Service Tag from a Dell system that I'm working on remotely. From cmd line this can be done with: wmic bios get serialnumber However, if you want to do something with the output, Powershell is a bit better: If you're wanting to only return the value … Continue reading PS One-Liner: Pull Dell Service Tag
Adding Alternate Computer Names to Windows Servers
Let's say you're doing a file server migration from one server to another and users have a bunch of desktop shortcuts mapped by UNC path. Perhaps this server holds files for a client application that has a bunch of UNC paths mapped within it. It's a real pain to hunt for each shortcut and edit … Continue reading Adding Alternate Computer Names to Windows Servers
