The Network Administrator Survival Kit

Introduction For many years I've been scripting using DOS Batch scripts. In the last few years I had also used VBScript.  I've never really got into PowerShell scripting. It just seemed so complicated with so many commands to learn. Recently I have forced myself to use PowerShell instead of DOS Batch scripts or VBScripts. It supports your typical programming style flow controls and variables. But there are so many commands or cmdlets ( in PowerShell terminology ) to learn. That's just on a standard Windows Server. If you are running PowerShell on an Exchange server, there will be Exchange server specific cmdlets on top of that. If you are running on Sharepoint, there will be Sharepoint specific cmdlets on top of that... and so on. For a beginner, let's first look at what we want to do, and see if we can find the cmdlets to help us achieve this. The tutorials will be based on learning PowerShell through writing scripts based on tasks that a system administr...

If you are like me and have mainly worked in small businesses then you may not have had the chance to setup a failover clustering environment. We've read all about it and how wonderful it is to have it, but unfortunately a lot of the times, the money is spent on more important things like staff salary and trying to keep the business afloat. Well, I am happy to say with the client I am working for right now, they have a very good failover clustering Hyper-V environment running on top of Windows Server 2012 R2  Datacentre attached to an EMC VNX 5300 SAN. The guy who set it up unfortunately no longer works there. To cut a long story short, I needed to move a VM to another node (another host in the cluster). With failover clustering being used for Hyper-V you need to run the Failover Cluster Manager to manage the VMs. You don't use the Hyper-V Manager, even though you can start it up and see the virtual machines. You can change some settings with Hyper-V Manager, but the reco...

The Network Administrator Survival Kit (NAS Kit) was conceived many years ago when I was a network administrator. It contained information such as troubleshooting procedures, tricks and tips. It was written in HTML and sits on a network share. My colleagues access it via a browser and only two of us who knew HTML was able to modify it. It was so useful because the information was specific to our organisation. No more re-inventing the wheel. The first thing we would do if we can't figure out the solution is to check out the NAS Kit. If we can't find the solution there, we would obviously research until we are able to resolve the issue. The next entry in the NAS Kit would be the steps that we have just used. Over the years, I have also found it so useful that there are so many sites across the web that are providing information that have helped me so often in my job. So now, here's a chance for me to pay it back. With 24 years of experience in IT ranging from desktop ...