Adventures in Tech

Powershell - The Love / Hate Relationship

2009-01-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

Powershell is Microsoft’s new scripting language and command shell. It is an Object oriented scripting language. Most of Microsoft’s products are manageable with it. It is extremely powerful but has a steep learning curve. I love what all I can do with it. It seems like I am learning more every day. However I have so much to learn about it. I have been able to do things like get a network inventory of all of our workstations including manufacturer, serial number, logged in user, processor, RAM. I could go on and on. I have used the Quest AD cmdlets to add every users phone number to their AD account. With as great as all of this is I waste so much time trying to get the scripts to work. Sometimes it would be easier to manually put information into AD instead of scripting it.

I will be posting some of my scripts and utilities I use to work with Powershell as I learn.

You can download Powershell version one here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx

The Quest for New Enterprise Antivirus

2009-01-15T17:24:00.000-08:00

I am going to moving from Symantec Antivirus at my work. This has not been an easy decision for me. I have used Symantec Antivirus for almost for ten years. I have depended on it and it has not let me down on a large scale. However version 11 is absolutely horrible. It takes up a lot of resources and is not easy to configure. Symantec has moved from a traditional Antivirus to a security agent that has Antivirus, Firewall, Intrusion detection, and client security.

I am going to looking at Sophos Antivirus and Kaspersky Antivirus. I am told that both have an enterprise solution. I have no experience with either software. I will also be looking at Cisco Security Agent. I know that it is a completely different approach. With Cisco Security Agent you have a list of trusted application and can block all the others. That is a very simple explanation. From what I can understand there are a lot more details.

As I learn more about each product I will be blogging about them.

Ubuntu 9.04 Vs. Windows7 Boot time

2009-01-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Softpedia has a story about Ubuntu 9.04 booting in 21 seconds. It is counting from the time the Grub boot loader appears until the logon manager appears. I thought it would be good to compare on Windows7. I have a Lenovo T60p that is a member of a domain. From the time the Lenovo BIOS disappears until the "Press CTRL + ALT + DELETE to log" on appears is 37 seconds. Has anyone tested this on a Windows 7 computer that is not a member of a domain? If so please let me know.

Here is the link for the Ubuntu story.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-9-04-Boots-in-21-4-Seconds-101885.shtml

Windows 7 Beta Network Performance

2009-01-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

One of my major complaints about Vista has been the network performance problems, or atleast what seemed to be network performance problems. I worked with a couple of guys at work on testing network performance with XP, Vista and Windows 7 Beta. We created following script to test with.

net use N: file://servername/C$/Test
mkdir ST
echo Start,%time% >> Results.csv

copy N:\ReportViewer.exe ST\RV.exe

echo Small,%time% >> Results.csv

copy N:\office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe ST\of.exe

echo Big,%time% >> Results.csv

echo F1,=B2-B1 >> Results.csv

echo F2,=B3-B2 >> Results.csv
del ST\RV.exe

del ST\OF.exe

rmdir ST
net use /delete N: /y

I used a Windows 2003 Server and a Windows 2008 Server for testing.

Here are the results:

I was shocked by the performance of Windows 7 downloading from Windows 2003 server. I hope that Microsoft works on this. Remember that this is a Beta and we will have to wait until RTM to determine the real performance. I am very impressed with the perfromance of Windows 7 and Windows 2008 server. Hopefully this does not change in the RTM.