Active Directory OU picker revisited

A PowerShell scripter’s work is never done. As you develop scripts over the years your skills improve and the way you write scripts changes. Sometimes you find that scripts you once created are due for an overhaul. The very first script I posted in my blog (in effect my very first post ever) was a function that creates a GUI or windows form showing your domain’s OU structure. While the script proved to be useful to a lot of people (thanks for the positive feedback, readers) there were some limitations that needed to be addressed:

Change network connection category using PowerShell

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

I recently came across an issue with PSRemoting to a Windows 7 XenDesktop VM. I discovered remoting was disabled on the remote system because one of the network connections was a Public connection (it was the PVS connection). To change this using PowerShell is quite easy in Windows 8 or higher: the Set-NetConnectionProfile command is available to do just that. However, in Windows 7 this is not so easy. Even though PowerShell 4 was installed, the command was absent. So I decided to create my own functions to facilitate this, based on this script by Microsoft: LINK. This script utilizes the Network List Manager to make the change. 

How to redirect Symantec Endpoint Protection client (v12.1.x) definition files

The Story

I’m currently working in a Citrix XenDesktop environment with pooled, non-persistent desktops. Citrix PVS is used to stream a read-only vDisk to VM’s on a XenServer infrastructure. Since a non-persistent desktop loses all updates after a reboot the Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) clients’ virus definitions also resets to the moment you last updated the definition files in your image. This means that, each day since the last vDisk version, the client will have to re-download all definition files after every reboot.

The obvious solution to this unwanted behavior is to move the definition files to a location on the persistent disk attached to the VM. The problem is that the SEP client does not have a configuration option that will allow you to do that. So I decided to create my own redirection solution. Here’s how I did it:

Copy AD group memberships from a source user to other users

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

This post is going to be short, but effective. One of those mondaine tasks you get to do as an IT administrator is assigning users to security groups for access to resources in the domain. Usually, when you ask the person making this request which security groups the user account needs membership for, they’ll tell you to use some other user account as a reference. Sometime you’ll even get a list of users that need to have the same memberships.

Screensaver not working in a XenDesktop VDI environment

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

The Story

I was troubleshooting some RES Workspace Manager (RES WM) issues in a customer’s XenDesktop 7.x (Citrix) environment when I came across the following issue: The screensaver didn’t start automatically, even though I had forced a screensaver through RES WM. After some research I’d come to the conclusion that this was a known issue in XenDesktop 7.x. Apparently Citrix has decided to disable Screen savers and power-save options in XenDesktop. They provide the following solution in their eDocs documentation: