First published: 2019-08-02, modified 2022-01-03 I am more of a Unix guy but I get to administer more and more Microsoft systems as time goes by. Back in the day Windows had very limited commandline options to manage systems. It often felt that you were working on a car with the bonnet welded shut. Luckily things changed when Powershell arrived on the scene. Powershell is a bit counter intuitive for someone that used Unix shells for 30 years but it is very powerful and you can do a lot with it. Read more

Note: This article seems to be quite popular. It was written in December 2019 but the Powershell Binaries may have been improved in the meantime. I have updated Powershell on Mac since then without issue and haven’t checked if the location of the libraries are still hard coded or if an older version of SSL is till required. I often need to run a remote session in powershell e.g. managing online exchange. Read more

Microsoft Outlook especially older versions is junk, but you probably knew that already. For some reason Outlook often sends out a message with incorrect syntax e.g. “[email protected]”. Mail servers like postfix will reject these messages but Outlook will not warn its user that there is a problem. Instead it will keep the message in the outbox and continously retry sending. If you are a postfix admin you can strip the apostrophes with a command filter. Read more

Windows sometimes has a mind of its own when it comes to DNS. To clear the windows DNS cache when you have issues do the following. Open cmd or powershell as administrator. Run ipconfig /flushdns

Windows Software Update Services provides a way for Windows sysadmins to control the distribution of updates to windows computers. It also helps to save a lot of bandwidth if you don’t have a superfast internet connection. Unfortunately many think that it is easy to setup and maintain. On newer version of Windows Server it is easy to setup but it needs a lot of care and feeding. I you want to run WSUS you will have to run the “Server Cleanup Wizard” at least once a month, or run Invoke-WSUSCleanup in a scheduled task. Read more

Do you need to install Windows via a network? Forget about Microsoft’s complicated setup. Rather use serva. It is easy and quick to set up. You can also install other operating systems if you wish.