VM-Aware

Here’s an interesting little piece comparing Microsoft’s PowerShell to good old Bash.

It is as non-biased as I have seen these comparisons be and it does a good job of pointing out the major difference, PowerShell is object-oriented and Bash isn’t. I don’t think that this in itself is reason enough to consider one better than the other, but it does mean that PowerShell can have a very steep learning curve whilst overall being more powerful.

It is an interesting PDF so have a look if you get chance.

A customer recently asked me how to increase the boot disk size of a Windows VM to increase the space available to WSUS.

I recommended using the WSUSutil command to move the data to a different drive rather than extend a boot drive.

Extending drives in ESX is very straightforward and it will work on a boot drive, however, Windows will not let you extend the boot drive into the new space using diskpart, whereas it will allow it on a non-boot drive.  So you normally have to use a helper VM or use something like GParted to help you out.  So for simplicity and probably best practice moving the WSUS data to a new disk is preferable.

So, add a new, bigger drive to the WSUS VM (which can be done without restarting the VM) go into disk management and format it as usual.  Now use the WSUSutil command line utility to migrate the data to the new drive.  This link should give you some good pointers on how to use the tool.

If you find that the data migration fails due to locked files etc, then try using something like XCopy or RoboCopy to migrate the files and then run WSUSutil again with the skipcopy parameter.

Hope this helps.

I found a bunch of great cmdlets that have now been bundled into the free Quest ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory package.  They include:

• Add-QADPermission
• Get-QADObjectSecurity
• Get-QADPermission
• Get-QADRootDSE
• Get-QARSAccessTemplate
• Get-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• New-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• Remove-QADPermission
• Remove-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• Set-QADObjectSecurity
• Set-QARSAccessTemplateLink

These helped no end in the management of AD permissions with PowerShell.  I found the original post discussing the package here, but you can download the Quest AD cmdlets here completely free of charge.

A blog at the Washington Post offers some little tidbits on how to make your websites more secure.

You can read the post here, bear in mind that it is totally IIS focussed, but pretty useful nonetheless.

I’ve been on a bit of a mission of late to find articles that make the sometimes complex seem more simple.

I don’t know about you, but I find navigating around the Sharepoint licensing model a complete and utter nightmare. So how pleased was I when I found Lady Licensing. Simple diagrams covering the following scenarios:

• Intranet Portal
• Intranet/Extranet
• Internet

Brilliant! It even comes with pictures. Need I say more? I thought not, check it out here.

For those of you that are interested in PowerShell to the point that you’d be curious as a possible release date then Jeffrey Snover may be your man.

A blog post of his indicates that v2 is feature complete and although he cannot explicitly mention a release date he intimates that mid 2009 is a good guess.

I think PowerShell is the best thing that Microsoft have done for many a year so I’m pretty excited by a big feature update.