by Katherine Villyard | Apr 12, 2013 | web
I used to do web development. In Cold Fusion, a lot of the time. Cold Fusion is a language with tags that usually start with CF, like “<cf_query>”. We had a customer who kept asking for the text to be bright red, huge, and blinking. (Not for the...
by Katherine Villyard | Mar 12, 2013 | geekiness, powershell, scripting
I went to the Atlanta PowerShell Users Group tonight. The topic was tips and tricks. My trick was this script, which task scheduler reads to me in the morning. Assuming you use Hiveminder–and you should, because it’s awesome–you only have to edit...
by Katherine Villyard | Feb 20, 2013 | powershell, sysadmin
I’m really digging the Exchange Management Shell. It’s FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! Okay, maybe not the whole family. 😉 Short example: someone wanted to know if I could tell them how many emails someone sent in a specific time period. Short answer:...
by Katherine Villyard | Feb 18, 2013 | web
There is a special circle of hell for people who spam obituaries. As it turns out, I have a modest talent for obituaries. (Also job references, and for the same reason: I’m good at finding unique good things about people and saying them.) Unfortunately, I...
by Katherine Villyard | Feb 17, 2013 | scripting
So, I have this friend *cough* who had a domain controller that needed a new motherboard. Due to the excitement of the hardware vendor’s tech forgetting to reattach the RAID, then the server no longer recognizing its network cards, and then the tech realizing...
by Katherine Villyard | Dec 22, 2012 | scripting
I support developers. In our dev/QA environment, people add, delete, and change the recovery model of databases all the time without telling me. How do I keep track of which databases need to be backed up? I don’t. I back up everything. Master has information...
by Katherine Villyard | Nov 26, 2012 | monitoring
Yum, Nagios gluttony! I’m donating Nagios monitoring to a couple of nonprofits, and this brings up how Nagios configurations grow. In short, you learn over time what you need to keep an eye on. For example: On one nonprofit, someone forgot to renew the domain...
by Katherine Villyard | Oct 30, 2012 | sysadmin
South Carolina Department of Revenue hacked: South Carolina state officials announced Friday evening that the social security numbers of some 3.6 million state residents and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers were exposed in a data breach. The SSNs were stored...
by Katherine Villyard | Oct 8, 2012 | scripting, sysadmin
You didn’t get this from me. You downloaded it off the internet. In fact, why don’t I turn that bunch of scripts into a series of jobs and give it to you as one big lump? (Download.) How to use: Load file into SQL Server Management Studio. Replace all...
by Katherine Villyard | Sep 23, 2012 | scripting
You never know when you’re going to have to plagiarize yourself. Seriously, I just repurposed the “migrate databases to new drives” script to be a “migrate databases to a new server” script. Rather than starting from scratch, I changed a...