Tech-Corner Posts

PowerShell logoAt work we are getting ready to create new user accounts for everyone and move their mailbox from the current AD account to the new account. The reason for this is a bit lengthy, but a big reason is people have been granted permissions based on their AD account rather than by group membership. So by switching AD accounts we can clean things up a bit. Currently the format of our usernames is first initial last name (example: John Doe is JDoe), and we will be changing to a first name dot last name format (example: John.Doe).


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Exchange PowerShell

Hey, I’m not sure if anyone else is really looking at this site, but just in case I wanted to post a message saying I’m still here. We have a lot of changes/upgrades taking place this summer at work so I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t been able to post much. We’ve been setting up 4 Cisco Nexus 5K switches and installing 2 new NetApp SANs. So we’ve been a little busy. I do have some things to post, but they will take a little time to get together. The big one will be the user script we’ve been working on. If you saw the earlier post about using PowerShell to post to an ActiveMQ script, this will be a continuation. It will have more about that and also include a section for creating folders on the NetApp SAN using CIFs, setting share permissions, and then setting NTFS permissions.


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Site News

Exchange LogoToday I’ve been looking into how I can create and Exchange Mailbox using PowerShell.

A little background. We have been using PowerShell to create new Active Directory accounts for awhile, but hadn’t looked into being able to create the mailbox on Exchange at the same time. The biggest problem (more a concern) is that I thought we needed to install the Exchange Management Tools (EMC and EMS) on our domain controllers or admin desktops. I was concerned these servers and computers wouldn’t get updated at the same time as our Exchange Servers and I didn’t want services packs and other updates to get out of sync.


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Exchange Microsoft

I’ve just started using the PowerShell ISE recently and started to really like the ability to type some commands and then run the code and test. So I was a…

Microsoft PowerShell

PowerShell logoWe have a project going on at work that requires us to take gather specific information about users from Active Directory and get it into another system. We already use PowerShell to create all of our new user accounts so we wanted to stick with that. However, the other system we have to get the information into requires us to write the AD information to an ActiveMQ queue. The preferred format for this information is XML. So I was asked to come up with a way to accomplish this.


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Microsoft PowerShell

Hey everyone, We have recently moved to a new hosting provider (HostGator.com). Please be patient as I can things to look the way I want. Thanks Eric

Site News

At work have two Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controllers and a number of Cisco AP’s. We have our wireless network split up into 3 different WLANS with different SSID’s. If you use a Windows computer you can connect to any of those 3 SSID’s without a problem and switch between them as needed. However, when we started to introduce iPads on our network we were able to get them attached to one SSID, but if we tried to switch to another one we would get a message that says “Unable to join network” with a Dismiss button. If you try 3, 4, or 5 times it would eventually switch. This however is very frustrating.


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Apple Cisco

Outlook LogoThe other day I started having problems opening links that were emailed to me. I would get the message in Outlook and then click the link, but would get a message saying:

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on your computer.

The solution was to run the following commands from an elevated Command Prompt.

REG ADD HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareClasses.htm /ve /d htmlfile /f


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Outlook

Create a CSV file that contains the following columns: ExternalEmailAddress Name Alias FirstName LastName OrganizationalUnit Then from the Exchange Management Shell run the following command: Import-CSV C:scriptsMyCSV.csv | ForEach-Object{New-MailContact -ExternalEmailAddress…

Exchange Microsoft

Blackberry LogoI just created some new databases on our Exchange 2010 server and moved some BlackBerry users to those new databases. I started getting calls from people saying they weren’t getting emails on the BlackBerry’s. I did some checking and found some event logs on the BES server that said the users could not be started. I did a search and came across a KB article on BlackBerry’s web site. Apparently, you need to run the following command on your Exchange servers when you add new databases. It will grant the needed permissions to the database and its users for the BES Admin account. I thought this was done globally when we setup the Exchange 2010 server, but I guess that isn’t the case.


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BlackBerry Exchange