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Matt Broadstock

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SMS Utilities

May 2006 - Posts

  • New script to modify user workstation restrictions

    http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/mattbro/articles/1354.aspx

    I recently had to use this in an emergency to modify 2500 user accounts so they could access a specific Citrix server so NFuse would work properly. I eventually helped our Citrix team find the settings that they needed to change so that all NFuse users didn't need access to that specific Citrix server. But I was certainly glad that I had this script already written. We had a ton of surgeons that couldn't get into their surgery software until I used this script to apply our temporary band-aid until we found the root cause.

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  • No free USB drive from Micro$oft

    Those cheap bastards! Smile [:)]

    I filled out some stupid survey a while back on their site that promised a free USB drive. I guess there must've been some size-1 font legal disclaimers that I didn't see because I just got the following in my e-mail:

    Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Solved Windows® licensing promotion. We've received your request for more information to help clarify Microsoft® Windows Desktop Licensing pre-loaded on the USB drive. Unfortunately, this Mystery Solved promotion was available in the U.S. only and while supplies last. Supply is depleted at this time, so we encourage you to please utilize the online alternative today.

    Honestly, I had totally forgotten about it and I think it was a small capacity drive anyway. I just wonder if anyone got one sent to them. I suppose "while supplies last" could mean: "We only have 3 of them so you have no chance in hell of ever receiving one".

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  • Fusion reactor on the way

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5012638.stm

    At only US$6 billion, this is a bargain. I'd love to see them throw ten times as much money at something like this. Maybe we could take that $5.9 billion worth of subsidies that our government is giving to the oil companies and pay for this whole project that way.

    I see fusion power as the one, achievable technology breakthrough that will totally change our planet for the better. The benefits aren't as great for established countries (other than the obvious envionmental positives) but I think third-world countries will move forward in leaps and bounds with cheaper, more-available power sources.

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  • Yet another unfixed SMS bug

    We recently ran into a bug while doing some cleanup of old packages/programs in SMS. It seems that the developers didn't use a restrictive enough query to determine what advertisements a program is tied to when you use the wizard to delete a program. So, when the popup box comes up telling you what advertisements will be removed when you delete the program, there is a good chance that a bunch of unrelated Adverts will show up in the list

    Here's a good thread on the issue: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.sms.admin/browse_thread/thread/f484eadce665bcba/9f4465f405cf71ec?lnk=st&q=sms+%22delete+program%22+advertisement&rnum=2#9f4465f405cf71ec

    Fortunately, SMS doesn't actually remove the unrelated Adverts--it just makes it look like it is going to do so. The annoying thing is that the issue has been around for at least a couple of years and the problem still isn't fixed (we are on 2003 SP2). According to the thread, the bug doesn't cause "bad behavior" so it isn't worth fixing. What a crock! I bet it would only take changing one line of code to modify the query so that it displays the smae Adverts that it actually deletes.

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  • More on blog etiquette

    I ran across a nice forum/article on the art of plagiarism in blogging. I *hate* copy/paste blogs. I don't even mind if people have large contents of material pasted in their blog as long as they at least have some useful comments to make on the subject matter.  There may not be a lot of us blogging on this site yet, but I'm always impressed by the content and the way it is presented. I've given up on a lot of other site feeds because I got sick of scrolling through all of the junk to get to the useful posts.

    Here is the link to the forum posts: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/05/22/1726224.shtml

    Here is the article (it is pretty short actually): http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=238

    http://72.14.203.104/search?sourceid=navclient-menuext&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plagiarismtoday.com%2F%3Fp%3D238 (google's cached version because I couldn't get the webpage to come up)

    Here's a post from the forums by Opportunist that sums up my feelings fairly well (and yes, I realize I am just copy/pasting it :)  But most of my posts are original or just hyperlinks with summaries so I suppose I'll let myself get away with being a little hypocritical on this one.):

    Nobody can read the whole internet. Nobody. So what people do is they rely on others to pick the interesting pieces worth reading and go from there.

    But there are 2 ways to do it: Summing up the content and providing a link, or ripping a few lines out of context and then mentioning in the fine print where they're from.

    While the first is something I do agree with, the second stinks of "I don't have content but I want visitors, but if I hand out my sources my visitors might go there instead of to me."

    So while I'm all for gathering info and making it available to your readers, I'm also very much against the "Readers Digest" approach: Snipping out what I deem valuable, copying it to my page and giving half-hearted credit to the real author. Linking is cool. Copy-paste-blogging is just lame.

    And I'd really wish this message could be sent to those who do it just that way.

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  • Newest IE7 is buggy as hell

    I've had nothing but problems since moving to the latest beta. I had issues with the older beta versions but nothing as bad as this. My browser hangs all the time and a bunch of websites (most notibly gmail) act really, really weird--to the point where they aren't usable. I still think IE7 is going to end up being really nice but it would be nice if the newer releases worked *better* than the older ones. It reminds me of Windows 95-the betas were a ton more stable than the final released version.

    I suppose that is why I am still using the memory hog known as Firefox at home. It may suck up resources like crazy but at least it works (and I don't think I could go back to living without tabbed browsing so there is no way I am am ever going back to IE6).

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  • VBA to perform bitwise comparisons

    More lessons learned from my account cleanup efforts...

    Here is a function you can use to do bitwise comparisons. This is a function I am using in MSAccess for a couple of things to help write queries against AD.

    Function SQL_And(Num1 As Long, Num2 As Long) As Long
      SQL_And = (Num1 And Num2)
    End Function

    Here's the SQL syntax I am using to find Disabled accounts:

    SELECT SQL_And(2,ADUsers.userAccountControl) AS Expr1, *
    FROM ADUsers
    WHERE (((SQL_And(2,[ADUsers].[userAccountControl]))=2));

    Here's what I am using to find accounts with password expiration disabled:

    SELECT SQL_And(65536,ADUsers.userAccountControl) AS Expr1, *
    FROM ADUsers
    WHERE (((SQL_And(65536,[ADUsers].[userAccountControl]))=65536));

    I mentioned in my other recent VBA post that it took me 4 hours to get a simple function working. This one is even worse....a one line function took me about 6 hours to get working correctly. Most of the time was doing research and trying to get it to work using straight SQL instead of calling a function...It's amazing how sometimes you can crank out 100's of lines of code in a couple of hours but one thing can stump you for hours and hours...

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  • VBA to convert UTC time to something friendly

    I'm doing some account cleanup in a number of directories to prepare for a metadirectory implementation. AD has been as painful as anything to work with. Here's some code that you can use to convert the UTC time that AD likes to use to something a bit more usable. (I dumped everything into Access so I could write a bunch of queries against all of the directories)

    I'm having it return 1/1/1601 if the record doesn't exist (i.e. for lastlogontimestamp, the user has never logged on). You could have it return whatever you wanted to though..

    Function UTC2Normal(utcDate) As Date
        If utcDate <> "" Then
      
       
            intvartype = VarType(utcDate)
            'utcDate = CDbl(utcDate)
            intutcDate1 = utcDate - 1.16444736E+17
            intutcdate2 = intutcDate1 / 10000000
            intutcDate3 = intutcDate2 / 1440
            intutcdate4 = intutcDate3 / 60
       
            '148012 = days from 1601 til today (3/31/06)
            '13238 = days from 1970 til today (3/31/06)
       
            '"d" compare is MUCH faster
            'UTC2Normal = DateAdd("s", intutcdate2, "1970-01-01")
            UTC2Normal = DateAdd("d", intutcdate4, "1970-01-01")

        Else
            UTC2Normal = "1/1/1601"
        End If
    End Function

    Here's some sample SQL syntax to utilize it:

    SELECT ADUsers.lastLogonTimestamp, utc2Normal(ADUsers.lastlogontimestamp) AS LastLogonFriendly, *
    FROM ADUsers;

    If you don't care about seconds, just days, use the line in blue instead of the line in green. It is much faster.

    To my everlasting shame, it took me about 4 hours to get this working correctly. I kept trying to get it to work using straight SQL but I'm not sure if it was even possible. After beating my head against the wall for way too long I stepped out for a smoke and my brain starting thinking about other options. Presto! Problem solved.

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  • A server room in your pocket

    Interesting article on ferroelectric based storage. I'm sure this will be another one of those things like holographic memory that I remember reading about 10 years ago that was supposed to accomplish the pretty much the same thing.... but it will certainly be nice when one of these new storage technologies gets all the kinks out so we don't have to mess with hard drives anymore.

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