On a default Windows installation there is a number of Windows services and scheduled tasks. These are configured to run with a specified set of credentials like LocalSystem, LocalService or NetworkService. New services is typically created when installing applications, which in a domain environment often require a domain account configured as the run as account. [...]

On January 13th – 14th the Nordic Infrastructure Conference (NIC) was arranged in Oslo, Norway for the first time. The goal for the conference is creating a premier event for all IT-professionals in the Nordics, and the first edition of NIC was a great success with a number of excellent speakers.   Demos, slides and [...]

On January 1st last year I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for my contributions in the PowerShell community. The MVP Award is valid for 1 year, and is based on the contributions for the past year. On January 1st this year I was re-awarded for my 2nd year as an MVP: Dear Jan Egil [...]

For a Windows administrator, working with network adapters is a common task. A common approach many companies use is configuring servers with static IP addresses (IPv4) and clients using DHCP. The IP address is just one of many properties of a network adapter, as we also have properties like subnet mask, default gateway, DNS server [...]

The Test-Connection cmdlet in Windows PowerShell was introduced in version 2.0, with the purpose of sending ICMP echo request packets ("pings") to one or more computers as stated in the cmdlet`s documentation. The cmdlet has a number of useful parameters, for example –Count to specify the number of request packets to send (the default is [...]

Since the release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows PowerShell is included in the operating system and enabled by default. This means Windows PowerShell 3.0 will be available in the next version of Windows. A preview version for developers of the next Windows version was released a few weeks ago, which means [...]

In the Windows Server Developer Preview (“Windows 8 Server”) released recently, a preview version of Windows PowerShell 3.0 is also included. In addition to the many news in the next version of PowerShell which I won`t cover in this article is a brand new feature named Windows PowerShell Web Access. As the name indicates this [...]

If you`re not already familiar with networking in Microsoft Hyper-V I would recommend you to have a look at this whitepaper from Microsoft, which described how networking works in Hyper-V. The following solution will describe a problem which might occur when configuring virtual networks in Hyper-V. Consider the following scenario: You`re about to configure a [...]

In Windows PowerShell we can use the Start-Transcript cmdlet to record PowerShell sessions to a text-file. This will record both the commands you`ve run as well as the output from the commands. Windows PowerShell MVP Jeffery Hicks recently wrote a great tip in his Friday Fun series on his blog, which tells you how to [...]

Cisco – widely known as a networking infrastructure vendor – entered the blade server market in 2009. Their offering is called Unified Computing System, described by Gartner as a fabric-enabled, enterprise-class platform with good integration of networking, virtualization, management tools and storage. On the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers they`re defined as a [...]