Quickly grab a Dell Serial number remotely
Had to quickly grab some serial numbers from Dell servers the other day along with RAM information. WMIC is an awesome way of doing this! Some links regarding further examples are here & here. In my case the below can quickly grab the serial either on the local machine or remotely from another device.
Open up a command prompt and enter the below -
C:\wmic bios get serialnumber
C:\wmic /user:administrator /node:remote-host bios get serialnumber
C:\wmic memorychip get banklabel, devicelocator, caption, capacity
The first example is for running on a local machine, the second for obtaining the serial of a remote device and the last is to grab some basic information regarding installed RAM.
SCP files to Cisco IOS Devices
This is an awesome way to grab and send files to Cisco IOS devices you manage remotely. We have alot of Cisco devices we connect to via SSH so instead of messing around with FTP/TFTP/HTTP transfer SCP makes it very quick and easy over the existing SSH setup.
If you already have SSH configured for remote management chances are you only need to use the 'ip scp server enable' command but I'll briefly list the steps required as per this nice guide here.
- Log on to your IOS based device
- Setup a domain name on the device
router>enable
router#conf t
router(config)#ip domain-name yourdomain.com - Generate an RSA key
router(config)#generate rsa general-keys label yourkeyname modulus 1024 exportable - Setup a privilege level 15 admin account if you don't already have one
router(config)#username user privilege 15 secret password - Enable AAA and some additional security measures
router(config)#aaa new-model
router(config)#aaa authentication login default local
router(config)#aaa authorization exec default local
router(config)#aaa authentication attempts login 3
router(config)#ip ssh time-out 120
router(config)#ip ssh authentication-retries 3 - Enable SCP
router(config)#ip scp server enable
To then make use of SCP you need an SCP client, PuTTY has one as part of the suite installer so head over HERE to grab a copy. Once you have PuTTY installed open up a command prompt and browse to the SCP client directory "C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY" is the default. Run the below to start pushing files over to the Cisco -
pscp -scp c:\yourfile.ext username@10.0.10.1:yourfile.ext
So as an example, if you want to push over a DSL firmware upgrade you might run the below -
pscp -scp c:\IOS\adsl_alc_20190_4.0.018.bin admin@192.168.11.254:adsl_alc_20190.bin
It will prompt for the password and then away it goes!
Prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections on MacOS X
Having recently set up a Mac again on my network I forgot how much I hate the .DS_Store files littering my NAS units / Windows boxes. So here's how to quickly disable their creation!
Note: This will affect the user's interactions with SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS and WebDAV servers.
- Open Terminal.
- Execute the below command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
- Either restart the computer or log out and back in the the user account.
For the Apple KB please check HERE
Checking Emails being bounced due to Send or Recieve Max Size
I often find myself referring to the following exchangepedia.com article to help remind myself of all the places you can set send and receive size limits for emails. Check it out HERE
A quick way of tracing how many emails may have been bounced via PowerShell is below (so much nicer then the 2010 message tracker). It will export the results out to a CSV file for convenience.
Get-MessageTrackingLog -EventID FAIL | where {$_.RecipientStatus -like “*SendSizeLimit*”} | Export-CSV c:\SendSize.csv
Get-MessageTrackingLog -EventID FAIL | where {$_.RecipientStatus -like “*RecipSizeLimit*”} | Export-CSV c:\RecipSize.csv
Symantec AV 10 Corporate not LiveUpdating
Had a few PCs in an older Symantec AntiVirus 10 Corporate environment that would update their Virus Definitions automatically. Having a quick hunt round managed to find the below on a forum post which did the trick, it would appear the local definitions on the clients had become corrupted. The second step looked to be the primary fix as communication itself was fine back to the server.
Credit HERE
The Client is unable to communicate with the server to get updates -
- On the Server open Command Prompt
- Type "Telnet clientname 2967" and press enter, if successful a blank prompt should appear
- If no prompt appears you need to check the port is open (firewall issues etc)
- Repeat the above on the Client PC replacing the clientname with the appropriate servername for the Telnet test.
- Compare the root certificate on the server (\\servername\vphome\pki\roots) and the client (c:\program files\Symantec Antivirus\pki\roots)
The old virus definitions are corrupted -
- Stop the Symantec Antivirus service
- Stop the Symantec Antivirus Definition Watcher service
- Delete the old Virus definitions (yyyymmdd.xxx) from "c:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec\Shared\VirusDefs"
- Empty the "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveUpdate\Downloads" folder
- Delete all .inventory and .setting files from the "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveUpdate" folder.
- Empty the "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5\I2_LDVP.VDP" folder
- Go to "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5\" and delete *.vdb or *.xdb files not folders
- Start the Symantec Antivirus service
- Start the Symantec Antivirus Definition Watcher service
- Run LiveUpdate again and hopefully all is ok!
Symantec LiveUpdate doesn’t show SSR or BESR
I'm surprised this is still an issue as I remember stumbling across and originally reporting the error way back on the earlier versions of Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. It seems to only persist on Windows Server 2008 R2 but here's links to the fix.
In short Symantec LiveUpdate doesn't register or show Backup Exec System Recovery, or the newer System Recovery 2011 software. On a fresh install when you try to run LiveUpdate it just lists the LiveUpdate software and nothing else, as above it seems consistent with Windows Server 2008 R2
FIX:
This is for SSR 2011 so needs slight adjustment for BESR -
Grab a copy of LUReg.exe from HERE
As per THIS guide run the below command (checking the version number of the software via Help/About)
LUReg.exe -REG -PDD "Symantec System Recovery 2011" -PDN "Symantec System Recovery 2011" -PDV "10.0.1.41704" -PDL "ENGLISH" -PDM "{70731099-3501-40B3-BF96-757371640003}"
Run LiveUpdate again and you should now see the SSR software listed.
Installing VMware Tools for Linux Guests
More for quick reference as I don't generally manage too many Linux boxes (yet anyway 
). Have recently done a few P2V migrations on to an ESXi 5 platform so the below helps get the tools installed inside a RedHat based VM, commands of course may vary slightly depending on distribution -
- As root (su -) mount the VMware Tools virtual CD
- Run the following commands:
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cd /tmp
tar zxpf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-5.0.xxxxxx.tar.gz (version number will differ depending on release)
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl - Run through the install prompts and job done!
As a side note, if you update the linux kernel (yum update etc) then just run vmware-config-tools.pl to get the tools running again.
For full guides check VMware links below:
Injecting VMware SCSI Drivers after P2V conversion
Having had a few old Microsoft Windows Server / Small Business Server 2003 boxes die, I managed to at least grab an image of the disks to then look at a P2V conversion.
The images where made with Acronis or O&O which I then restored to a VMware virtual environment, the problem being that as the server had already died I couldn't inject the drivers pre-conversion. This gave a lovely 0x0000007B Inaccessible_Boot_Device BSOD once the restored VM tried to boot Windows.
The article from VMware that initially helped point in the right direction is HERE
To inject the drivers I booted the VM with ERD Commander (available via Microsoft DART) then imported the required .sys files and registry keys as the above VMware KB articles references.
Once done the old Server 2003 images worked perfectly!
I've included the required reg/driver files to save having to build a 2003 environment.
Taken from a Server 2003 32bit environment - VMSCSI.zip
Purge Deleted Mailboxes in Exchange 2010
Having transferred a number of old mailboxes out to PST (Exchange 2010 SP1 is awesome!) I needed to purge the now deleted users and the associated mailboxes.
This was part of an Exchange 2007 to 2010 migration where I found the helpful commands here & here.
In brief:
Set the the Mailbox Database retention period in the Exchange 2010 console. This is found via Organization Configuration - Mailbox - Database Management Tab - Select the Database and Right Click to view Properties - Limits Tab and then set the Deletion settings to Zero whilst unticking the 'Don't Permanently delete...' option.
Load up the Exchange Power Shell and run the below -
Get-MailboxDatabase -server "servername" | Clean-MailboxDatabase "Database Name"
Once done you can now dismount the Database and run the below via CMD to defrag and reclaim the disk space -
eseutil /d "C:\mailbox database path\database.edb"
Now remount the store, set the retention options back to their preferred and job done!
Outlook 2010 Large OST with Cached Mailboxes
Outlook 2010, by default, now cache's any additional mailboxes a user may have attached. This can cause the locally held OST file to jump in size quite considerably! I certainly tend to see issues on older machines once the OST file goes over 10GB but some have hit the 50GB mark which cripples Outlook - I believe this is also the physical cap for the file.
In Outlook 2007 you could turn caching on for shared mailboxes via this MS Article (HERE)
In Outlook 2010 you can turn this feature off so it reverts back to how Outlook 2007 handled cache via this MS Article (HERE)
To turn Outlook 2010 Cache for Shared Folders off:
- Close Outlook
- Open RegEdit (via Start, Run, type in Regedit, Click OK)
- Browse to the below key -
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Cached Mode - Look for (or create) the following REG_DWORD -
CacheOthersMail - Set the Value to 0
- Job Done!
I'm not aware of any immediate Best Practices but as a possible work around (should users need an offline ability for any additional mailboxes) Outlook 2010 is now able to hold multiple Exchange accounts within one profile. These each then cache to their own individual OST files and show as if they were attached mailboxes to help remove any confusion to an end user.