This will be another short one, but I figured someone else will have run into this. While I was doing a rework for a Veeam implementation, I noticed on several jobs that there were exclusions set inside the jobs. I wanted a list of all jobs with their respective exclusions, time for Powershell! The script starts by getting a list of all Veeam jobs. Next, it will go through all jobs and look for objects that have the type “Exclude” set. What follows is a bit of code to match the job name to the different exclusions and dump everything into a CSV. I struggled a bit with getting the contents of the array listed properly in the CSV, I kept getting the array listed as “System Object[]”. Turns out I just needed to put the $VMExclusions variable between quotes. ...

A couple of our web servers were running into some issues with disk space. Turns out the logs weren’t being cleaned up properly. In order to remediate this, I wrote a function that can be reused anywhere. The function accepts 3 parameters: FilePath: The directory where you want to remove the logs from CutOff; Specifies the age (in days) that a file must have before being deleted. LogPath; This parameter specifies the directory where you want the CSV log file. If this is left open, no CSV will be saved. Example As an example, I’m going to remove all files, older than 30 days, from the folder “C:\temp\W3SVC2030036971\W3SVC2030036971". I want a CSV log to be written in the “C:\temp” folder. ...

Today I got my shiny new host for the homelab. After installing ESXi, I noticed the 10 Gbit NICs weren’t being detected. After looking around a bit I found the drivers in the form of a VIB. Start by uploading the VIB to a datastore that is accessible to the host. Turn on the SSH service in the security section and fire up a session. Once connected run esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/NAS1-iSCSI/net-ixgbe_4.4.1-1OEM.600.0.0.2159203.vib ...

When upgrading HP Comware switches that are part of an IRF stack, you want to use In Service Software Upgrade (ISSU). This allows you to do a rolling upgrade of the firmware while limiting the impact to just 1 switch in the stack. ISSU will reboot 1 switch in the stack, wait for it to come back up and then moves on to the next switch. Types of ISSU There are 3 types of ISSU: ...

A while back a client of ours had some issues with DFS replication between 2 nodes. One of the members reported a backlog of over 1 million files! Upon further investigation, I found the DFS database on that node got corrupted which caused it start the initial sync again. We let the process run it’s course over a couple of days but noticed the progress was incredibly slow. We were averaging about 3000 files / hour. After some quick math, it’d take about 16 days before the sync completed. And that’s not taking into account anyone working on the file servers. ...

If you’ve ever had the “pleasure” of building an IPSec tunnel between 2 endpoints from different vendors, you’ll know how smooth that usually goes. Today I was building a tunnel between a Fortigate 70D and an Axsguard Gatekeeper, as you can guess, things didn’t go as planned. Fortigate Let’s start by creating the tunnel on the Fortigate. Create a new tunnel and select the Custom VPN Tunnel template. Next, fill in all the phase 1 settings. In this example, I’m using 3DES and SHA1. While 3DES is still considered as secure, I would recommend against using it in production, mainly because of the speed. If you want to use the public IP address as the local ID, leave the field empty. Fortigate will automatically send its public IP as the local ID. Keep this in mind when you’re behind a NAT device. ...

While setting up a new Fortigate 30D for a client, I wanted to add a new VLAN for the guest Wi-Fi network. Usually, you just go into Network - Interfaces and add a new Interface there. On the 30D however, this option wasn’t there. After changing the device from switch mode to interface mode and back, I figured you can’t do it in the GUI. The only way to do it on a 30D is by using the CLI. ...

Late last week I had a client call me about Word acting slow. After a quick checkup, I noticed that Word was using 25 - 40% CPU. I hadn’t received any other reports so I assumed it was a one-off and recreated the document. This sorted the issue for that particular computer. Today I got the same report from a dozen more people. I started digging around in the documents that were having issues and noticed a drop in CPU usage when removing the header and footer. More specifically, removing images or objects in the header and footer. ...