Script

Splunk search results can be exported from the UI as CSV, JSON, and XML, but not as HTML. This article presents a PowerShell script that converts exported search results from JSON into an HTML table for use with documentation, blogs, etc.

There is more than one way to test the performance of web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or IE, but regardless of how you do it, you need a consistent workload that makes the browsers comparable. Unless you are testing with synthetic benchmarks (which come with a plethora of problems of their own) you need a way to automate browsers opening tabs and loading URLs. This article presents a simple solution to do just that.

Cleanly shutting down all virtual machines on a given set of hosts is not as trivial as it might seem - especially if you want to be able to restore the original state once the planned maintenance you are doing this for is completed.

Managing Internet Explorer via group policy is a daunting task. Hundreds of policies are available to control the browser’s user interface, security settings and much more. This article lists strategies and scripts I have found helpful.

The script published in this article was kindly contributed by Bo Riis, a sysadmin working at Danish hosting company dandomain. Here is what he writes about it: Recently I had some issues with MS Office getting really slow on some of our customers’ terminal servers. After some intensive debugging we came to the conclusion that when users disconnected a session they left behind their open printer ports. It seems like that these ports don’t get cleaned up after a while, like the session they belong to. These ghost ports linger and use more and more resources in the print spooler and Office does not react well to a busy print spooler. One of our servers had more than 3000 of these orphaned ports. [Whoa!]

When you are publishing PowerShell code on the web, you soon discover that it looks much nicer with syntax highlighting - as did I. There are several ways to add syntax highlighting to your blog or web site, most of which rely on external (Wordpress) plugins or JavaScript on the page. I do not like that approach too much. I prefer to have the syntax highlighting embedded in the HTML code. That way I have full control over the appearance (and the highlighting also works in the RSS feed). The logical solution is to use a script that embeds HTML coloring tags directly into the script.

This article describes how to list all installed MSI packages. A more comprehensive listing of all applications displayed in Programs and Features can be obtained through our monitoring and analytics product uberAgent.

Update 2010-04-20: Thanks to Stefan Henseler the script now works correctly with multiple dependencies in a single file. Be sure to download the current version below. App-V’s Dynamic Suite Composition is a powerful feature in that it allows multiple “bubbles” to share the same virtual environment. In other words, package A can be made dependent on package B. But if DSC is used extensively, dependencies between packages tend to become difficult to manage - there seems to be no simple way of listing all packages’ dependencies. Well, I have written a PowerShell script that does just that.

What is the best way to learn PowerShell? Never use cmd.exe again! With PowerShell 2.0 on my Windows 7 machine I decided it finally is time to polish my rusty knowledge of the language dating back to the days when PowerShell was still called Monad. In my attempt to re-familiarize myself with PoSh I consciously use it for tasks that would take me mere seconds with other tools like cmd.exe, or even old friends like Perl. But, hey, learning takes time, and there is nothing better than practice! Here are a couple of things I have learned en route.

Executable files can (and should be!) digitally signed. Without a digital signature you can never be sure the files on your hard disk have not been tampered with. There is really no exception to this rule, except maybe smaller open source projects that lack the budget to buy the digital certificate required for signing. Digitally signing executable files is so important that Microsoft made it a requirement in the Windows 7 Logo Program. One might think that such a simple yet important thing as signed executables can be taken for granted by now. Well, let’s have a look!

A question on the terminal services newsgroup brought this topic to my attention: how can be determined programmatically if a Windows Server 2008 system is a terminal server and whether it runs in application server or remote administration mode?