Posted on September 10th, 2006 by Mark Sheppard
Windows PowerShell is an fantastic tool that will become part of my “used daily†toolkit. I came across Jeffrey Snover’s blog a couple of weeks ago and have really enjoyed reading it. I also recommend the 10 part series on managing Active Directory with powerShell on the /\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled blog, it is very insightful but I felt that I need something more basic to learn the product from the ground up.
Enter Jeffrey’s recently published presentation (from tech-Ed 2006) on PowerShell – this guy makes an hour and 15 minutes of the command line amusing to watch and very informative. I’d prescribe it to all IT Pros as this is going to be your tool of choice in the future.
A couple of things stand out from the presentation. One is that all other scripting mechanism shipped with windows are “feature complete†and two is that in Exchange 2007 (E 12), the MMC admin interface calls PowerShell to perform functions.
The implications of the first one are massive, cscript/wscript/WSH will not be extended in the future and CMD will not get any more features added! PowerShell will be the ONLY scripting tool for admin scripting and will I imagine replace CMD. This is a big shift and if you don’t embrace PowerShell in the Longhorn Server timeframe, you’ll find yourself without any scripting tools and without any community support!
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Filed under: PowerShell
Posted on September 10th, 2006 by Mark Sheppard
It’s now been almost 3 months since I purchased and built my monster desktop and I’ve had quite a bit of excitement with it.
To start with, the SATA II RAID 5 controller on the ASUS motherboard wasn’t up to spec. It just about worked until I wanted to perform more than one disk operation, then it just died. For example, say I was copying a large file across the network at 100Mbs and wanted to do something else at the same time, the LUN would grind to a halt and windows would error.
To get round this I configured the system to have a RAID 0 LUN instead, forgetting the reasons why I wanted RAID 5 in the first place.
This worked well for a couple of weeks until S.M.A.R.T. started reporting that one of the disks in the system was bad! To be honest, I was surprised at this because Weston Digital run each and every one of their disks in a lab before selling them, but they it was: Disk is about to fail messages and the Windows log full of errors when the disk system stopped.
This is the exact reason I specified RAID 5 when coming up with the specification for the computer. So I decided to implement RAID 5 whilst the failed hard disk was being RMA’ed with Weston Digital – an excellent and hassle free service by the way, I completed a form on their web site, keyed in my credit card details (insurance only) and WD sent be a new HDD within a couple of day. I then had 30 days to send the defective drive back to them else they’d chare by credit card.
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Filed under: 64 bit
