Group Policy is great, but sometimes you need to make tweaks to your systems in ways that aren’t covered by existing Group Policy settings. Traditionally login scripts were used to perform this task, but more recently I have used PolicyMaker by DesktopStandard. When Microsoft bought DesktopStandard and repackaged PolicyMaker as “Group Policy Client Side Extensions” [...]
There’s Geeks in the Bushes …
Nick Brown reports from the frontline of IT
Deploying Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP via Group Policy
Posted on November 30th 2009, 21:43:16 by Nick BrownList Number of Mailboxes per Exchange Server
Posted on April 23rd 2009, 10:00:38 by Nick BrownAnother powershell script. This time making use of the .NET DirectorySearcher class. The title pretty much says it all – the output from the script lists each Exchange server in the organization with the number of mailboxes hosted.
Querying WSUS with Powershell
Posted on February 11th 2009, 10:42:27 by Nick BrownOut of the box, WSUS is capable of reporting update status in a number of permutations, but I always seem to need some combination that I can’t easily derive using the GUI. I recently needed to determine the status of a particular update (KB958644) for a number of computers that spanned different WSUS groups. I [...]
Open Audit
Posted on February 9th 2009, 12:35:17 by Nick BrownOpen Audit is an Open Source application distributed under the Creative Commons license to provide a hardware and software inventory of systems on your network. It uses Windows VBScript and Linux BASH scripts on the client to post audit info to a PHP/MySql server application. The application comes with a number of built-in queries and [...]
Vista and Advertised Shortcuts
Posted on January 28th 2009, 11:18:00 by Nick BrownThere appears to be a problem with the Vista Start Menu and advertised shortcuts (as used by Office 2007 among others). The symptom is that applications are not launched when you click on the shortcut from the recently used apps list on the Start Menu. I’m not the only one to come across this as [...]