Certificate Authority Monitoring – Powershell!

“The web interface (http://server.domain.local/certsrv/)” as I like to call it is the administration panel for Windows certificate authority.
My colleague and expert in the industry Tom Nolan has written a powershell script for us to add more function and view to our CA management processes. The script uses a function of certutil to check for requests.

http://bit.ly/5IpvDj

Exchange Bulk Management – Mail Contacts

Working on an Exchange 2007 system today I revisted a problem where I needed to create a fast distribution list.
Comparing to our Linux friends in sendmail it’s much easier you simply create a file with a list of recipients externally and use them as a valid distribution group. In order to do something like this with exchange we will want to use Bulk Management and include a CSV file for source.

1) Create a CSV file lets name it contacts.csv with a listing of e-mail address recipients externally. These addresses will be added to the exchange server as mail enabled contacts. Store this file in the path on your exchange server, it will be run through Powershell.
2) Shell one-liner like this:
# contacts.csv is a sample csv file containing below columns:
# name,company,department,displayName,targetAddress,mailNickname
import-csv contacts.csv | foreach { new-mailcontact -alias $_.mailnickname -name $_.displayName -ExternalEmailAddress $_.targetaddress -org Users }

We can change ‘-org Users’ with other organizational units such as creating a new one based on this distribution list which i highly recommend to keep your active directory sorted.

For a full listing of parameters used with new-mailcontact in PS check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124519.aspx.

Sharepoint and alternative access mapping.

Recently I shared discussion with a member on ServerFault whom had been experiencing difficulty accessing a sharepoint site externally.

I have experienced this before and thought it would be a good opportunity to share the solution to google finders out there. 😉

http://serverfault.com/questions/83364/sharepoint-site-is-not-visible-over-the-internet/83371#83371

Query RDP connection

When using Remote Desktop to log into server machines if you have multiple users with access you will get the following error message when sessions are exceeded:
The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections.

A great solution, from your workstation via the command line.
C:\>query session /server:servername
SESSIONNAME USERNAME ID STATE TYPE DEVICE
services 0 Disc
console 1 Conn
rdp-tcp 65536 Listen

To reset a session, look for the relevant session ID in the “ID” column of the output from the above command, then use:
reset session /server:servername

In addition if you simply want to connect via the console, MSTC /v:hostname /admin will do the trick, use /? for a full list of commands.

SQL Server Connection String

You can you use this method to create a number of connection strings, in this tip we can look at generating code for SQL Server connection string but it can also be used for host of other connection strings including Analysis Services and SSAS.

http://www.gre-sqlserver-solutions.com/sqlserverconnectionstring.html