The personal importance of blogging

Over the years, I’ve come to develop a lot of solutions (processes, scripts, workflows, and other tooling) to help customers get the most out of their investments and solve business problems.

One of the most important habits I’ve developed is making sure that I write everything down, since many customers will have similar types of issues or requirements. … [ Continue reading ]

What is WinRM?

What is WinRM?

WinRM, for those of you not in the know, is really the Microsoft answer to an age-old problem in the Windows world–remote command and task execution.  It’s the Windows equivalent of the Unix rsh, a native implementation of the PsExec (albeit, with the added complexity that seeps into nearly all Microsoft technologies). … [ Continue reading ]

Handy Office 365 PowerShell One-Liners

Here are some handy one-liners that you may find useful when managing Office 365.

Ok, some of them are a few lines, but they’re still handy.

Connecting to things

Connect to the Microsoft Online Services interface for account management tasks.

import-module MSOnline
$cred = Get-Credential
Connect-MSOLService -credential $cred

Connect to the Microsoft Exchange Online interface for Exchange-related tasks.

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Boot from VHD is Wicked Awesome

Boot from VHD is a great technology that enables you to host multiple self-contained operating systems on a single hard drive. Similar to dual-booting, but you don’t have to worry about installing applications over each other or overwriting program file updates because your secondary OS is fully contained within a single virtual hard disk file. … [ Continue reading ]

How to Join Windows XP Media Center to a Domain

During an SBS deployment, I ran into a few machines at my customer’s site that were running Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). As most of you know, the only machines that are technically eligible to join a Windows domain are “Business” class operating systems, such as Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise (although not technically “business” class, Windows Vista/7 Ultimate Editions are also able to join domains, since they’re supposed to be everything-but-the-kitchen-sink editions).… [ Continue reading ]

Fun with PIX, Part Deux : PIX Password Recovery

After getting my PIX to boot in my previous post, I decided to run through the password recovery procedures.

Requirements

  • PIX recovery images (available from either the Cisco site individually or here in one ZIP file)
  • PIX firewall software version
  • TFTP server software (I used the TFTP server included in the PacketTrap pt360 Suite in this exercise)
  • Terminal Emulator (I typically use PuTTY)

Steps

  1. Connect Ethernet 0 on the PIX to your local LAN.
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