Help! Telnet not installed!

Note: This blogpost is also posted on the PepperCrew website.

If you’re a system administrator the following has probably happened to you: you’re trying to troubleshoot a connection issue to a service in the environment and you want to test if a specific port is open on the destination machine. Being the veteran that you are you immediately turn to the trusted telnet command only to receive the dredded Telnet is not recognized as a command… error notifying you the client is not installed on the local system.

So now what? Sure you can simply install the client and go back to your old ways but there’s a better alternative these days that requires no installation: the PowerShell command Test-NetConnection (not available on Windows 7 but we’ll fix that later on).

Preserve audio volume and mute in RES One Workspace

 

Note: This blogpost is also posted on the PepperCrew website.

 

RES One Workspace has a lot of great options to preserve your settings between sessions. But some settings are not as easy to capture because there’s no file or registry setting for them. One of these troublemakers is the volume of the audio. If you’ve adjusted the volume in a session to be less than 100% or even muted the audio completely you’ll find yourself having to do this each time you start a new session (unless you’re on a dedicated persistent client of course). 

Capture multiple images using one MDT task sequence

 

Note: This blogpost is also posted on the PepperCrew website.

If you deploy images in your environment that are very similar, meaning one has a few more applications installed than the other, then this is the blogpost for you! In this blogpost I’m going to share a script with you that will allow you to capture multiple images in one WIM file using only one MDT task sequence. Sound good? Let’s get cracking! 

RES One Automation PowerShell Module

Note: This blogpost is also posted on the PepperCrew website.

When you’re a system administrator and a PowerShell enthusiast a single solution to a problem can result in something big and elaborate. A while ago I was implementing a MDT environment for a customer. I wanted to fill the MDT database with all existing client computers. For that I needed all the clients names and their MAC addresses. Client names weren’t the issue but MAC addresses were a little bit more challenging. I decided to turn to RES One Automation (RES AM) for help. I knew RES AM has the ability to identify agents by their MAC address so it has to store all agent MAC addresses in the datastore. After figuring out how to pry this information from the database I started to wonder what else I could find in there. This resulted in a complete PowerShell module (my first!) for RES One Automation! 

Configure WER User-Mode (Application) crash dumps PowerShell-style

Note: This blogpost is also posted on the PepperCrew website.

When you’re a system administrator you’re likely to encounter a few application crashes during your career. In order to troubleshoot these crashes Windows Error Reporting (WER) comes in handy. It can be configured so that full user-mode dumps are collected and stored locally after a user-mode application crashes. You can than send the dumps to the software supplier or analyse it yourself using your tool of choice.