[TL,DR: I’ve written a script to retrieve IP Addresses from subnets not defined in Active Directory. It is published on Technet Gallery: Get-MissingSubnets] Active Directory uses Sites to define where in the topology a computer resides and thereby determining which server that should be used for certain services. For example sites are used to determine which Domain Controller a client should use as a logon server and if one of my clients log on at a site somewhere in Australia I probably don’t want it to process Group Policies from a Domain Controller in the US.

The VMware vShield driver is a system driver named vsepflt. It is easy to check the status of this driver by running msinfo32.exe and navigating to “Software EnvironmentSystem Drivers” This can however be a bit cumbersome on an environment with more than one virtual machine. That’s why I recommend using PowerShell instead. The System Drivers category displayed by msinfo32 is nothing else than the WMI-class Win32_SystemDriver, so I wrote a short function that can be used to inventory the status of the VMware vShield driver.

When working with Active Directory and Powershell using ldap filters is a great way of searching the directory with great performance. The only problem is that ldap filters tend to be a bit hard to read and sometimes they appear to be a jitter of parentheses with some cryptic values in between. When I write ldap filters I usually write them as multiline indented text, for example let say I wanted to search for all users (not contacts or computers) that is enabled and not set to expire.

I was playing around with the cmdlets in the DFSR-module the other day and realized that none of them could (as far as I could tell) give me a reliable count on the number of items in the DFSR Backlog. My plan was to initiate a replication of two folders and then have a script monitor the backlog to generate status messages to keep me informed of the progress. I searched for a way to accomplish this by looking at the commands in the DFSR module that have the verb Get

If a Distribution Point in System Center Configuration Manager has failed packages it probably has a cause and resending the packages might not be the right solution to the problem. But I had the need to resend all failed packages on a distribution point and I was in no mood to click around in the GUI so I investigated the WMI classes listed on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh949540.aspx First of all, what I am looking for is packages on a certain distribution point.