The Lonely Administrator

I’m busy polishing my presentations and demos for next week’s Techmentor conference in sunny Orlando, Fl. I’ve been presenting at Techmentor for a number of years now and it is a great show for administrators searching for answers to the problems and challenges they face today. You get intimate sessions with industry experts like Don [...]

I’ve recently started using the Server Core option for my test servers, especially for things like domain controllers. I can get by with smaller disk and memory requirements. Once you get the server configured, there’s very little you have to do that actually requires logging on to the server. Which is good because all you [...]

This question comes up quite often: “How can I encourage adoption of Windows PowerShell in my organization?” I periodically poll people about their adoption plans and what sort of things are standing in the way. Most of the obstacles in my opinion can be cleared with experience, exposure and education. On Twitter today, @ChuckBoyceJr was [...]

I will be presenting several sessions at Techmentor in Orlando, FL March 8-12, 2010. I will be doing the following sessions:

Take Back your File Server (learn about Server 2008 file management features)
Top 10 Non-PowerShell CLI Tools you MUST Know (learn about other command line tools that can get the job done)
Scripting, Error Handling and Debugging [...]

Once again, the fine forum members at ScriptingAnswers.com come through and help get my PowerShell idea engine revving. The latest post posed this basic question: “I need to query my servers and find all services using a specific service account.” The poster thought this would be a good opportunity to learn PowerShell and I wholeheartedly [...]

Some of you know my relationship with the a command prompt goes back a long, long way. Naturally I became very adept at using the DIR command, fully taking advantage of its switches to tease out hidden information or to quickly get just the information I wanted. When PowerShell first came out, I made the [...]

I trust by now you are realizing how valuable Windows PowerShell  is as a management tool. With a one line command you can accomplish an extraordinary amount of work. Sometimes this work may be long running, which is where background jobs come in handy. Or you may simply kick off a long running script and [...]