As part of my Service Level Agreement at work I have to produce a monthly uptime report for each server. Rather than generate individual reports for each server I decided to write a KiXtart script that would generate a report for all servers and email it to me each month.
At work there is an old web application that is managed offsite by a hosting company. It runs on Oracle 9iAS. Apparently there is an issue with Oracle 9i and the web service will frequently crash (due to a known caching problem) taking the application offline.
I recently bought a batch of Dell Latitude E4300 laptops as replacements for outdated machines at work. I retained one for myself and after a few days decided to wipe Windows XP and install Windows Vista Business. Everything was fine until I wanted to burn a copy of Knoppix from an .ISO image.
I recently had a problem when I rebooted an Exchange 2003 server after some updates and it refused to display the winlogon screen. Instead it sat at "applying computer settings". I left it for around 10 minutes before realising something was seriously wrong.
Every now and then I find myself needing to create a file of a certain size for one reason or another. This is usually for testing in situations where people are experiencing email attachment issues or disk quota problems, things like that. The quickest way to do this is to use a Windows command line utility called fsutil.exe. This command line tool can be used (amongst other things) for quota management, system info enumeration and some basic file manipulation.
I just had an issue where I was trying to install PowerDVD 5.1 onto a Dell laptop with a fresh Windows XP install. The PowerDVD software was on Dell branded media and I had reinstalled the laptop using a non OEM Dell branded version of Windows XP Professional. It seems that there is a check during the installation process of PowerDVD to verify that the software is indeed being reinstalled back onto a Dell branded computer. As I hadn’t used the original reinstallation CD that came with the laptop I had half guessed that PowerDVD was going to complain.
I have 6 Adtran Netvanta 1524st switches on which I wanted to disable STP (spanning tree protocol). After checking the switches through their web interface and using SSH to check the Adtran Operating System (AOS) command line help I was unable to spot any obvious method of disabling it.
Here is a registry key I run from a startup script to disable the option that allows users to invoke a "Log on using dial-up connection". Having had experience of working in a school I know how kids will use any excuse to distract them from logging onto a computer and starting the lesson!
Here is another quick KiXtart script I wrote to backup a Microsoft SQL database on a server. I personally run it locally on the server that contains the database I want to backup using a scheduled task. It connects to the MSSQL database using the OSQL command line utility which it runs through a shell.
Here's a quick script written using KiXtart to retrieve information for a user (object) in Active Directory. Once enumerated, object information is stored in variables to be used later.