Yet Another IT Professional Blog

HOW TO IMPORT / EXPORT ActiveDirectory User List with Properties (French Characters – UTF8)   1- Export Users to a CSV file from an OU with the following command. (Don’t forget to “import-module ActiveDirectory” when you start PowerShell) Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "OU=Administrateurs Systeme,OU=Utilisateurs,dc=domain,dc=com" -properties * | Export-Csv C:\AdminSysteme.csv -Encoding UTF8

Recently, I was working on a vSphere 4.1 upgrade to vSphere 5.5 and of course, first thing first; I had to update all the physical servers to the latest versions of BIOS, firmware, drivers… At a first glance, this seems an easy procedure. I’m thinking to use the Dell iDrac console to update most of the stuff but I soon realized that I wasn’t able to update NIC firmware and BIOS through the iDrac. When you go to the Dell Support web site to download the drivers for a specific model of server, you’ll realize that Dell is offering at least 4-5 different troubleshooting and updater utilities… Some of them are as big as 7.5GB ISO files! The problem with these utilities is that they are not really well documented and it takes a lot of effort to prepare and use them.  Here are a couple of examples;

Recently, one of my users lost all his auto-complete list from his mailbox! For me, this is no big deal as I barely send emails but for our employees who sends / receives hundreds of emails per day, it's a pretty big deal and a very practical feature to have. Outlook will create a little database of the email addresses that you send or receive emails from into a file generically called "Auto-Complete". In the previous versions of the Microsoft Office suite, this file was the famous "NK2" file.

If you’ve never heard of DD-WRT by now… You should go to that link quickly. ( http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index ) DD-WRT is a Linux-based firmware for wireless routers and wireless access points. Basically, it’s a firmware compatible with some cheap end-user wireless routers. Once you load that firmware on your router, you get lots of cool networking features that you would normally find in enterprise products for a lot of $$$. Some of the cool features of DD-WRT are WDS, VLAN, Multiple SSID, QoS, different wiles modes (Access Point, Bridge, Repeater, etc…), and the list goes on… It’s free to download and use. Please use it at your own risk because during the process of flashing your router, you can also “brick” your router although, I’ve never experienced this personally. Not every router is compatible with DD-WRT, so please check the “compatibility” page before trying anything. Compatible Router Database http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/router-database In this article,...

A great article about how to create custom Libraries in Windows 7 and how to deploy these custom libraries to other compters in your network through group policy. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/create-custom-libraries-in-windows-7-and-deploy-them-through-group-policy.aspx