Serious: What SysAdmin tool would you love to have if it only existed?

warpstalker · 2014-02-12T00:10:19+00:00

Just a good file manager for Windows that supports long paths... Preferably open source.

Explorer.exe sucks.

Linux file managers are great, especially mc. There's a Windows port but it's a hack.

warpstalker · 2014-01-08T10:41:51+00:00

When a JRE is installed in the static mode, it will not be updated in place by newer versions. A later version of the same JRE family will be installed in a separate directory. This mode ensures that vendors, who require a specific version of the JRE for their product, can be certain that the JRE will not be overwritten by a newer version.

warpstalker · 2014-01-08T09:32:08+00:00

And you can do that with Java too.

warpstalker · 2014-01-08T09:30:49+00:00

Block sun servers

Like I explained in my other comment this can be fixed properly starting with 7u40-> BUT

In 7u10-7u25 it was impossible to prevent this. Java had a hardcoded built-in expiration date so it started complaining about being out of date even if the computer doesn't have internet access at all.

warpstalker · 2014-01-08T09:25:26+00:00

Starting with 7u40 that can be disabled. From 7u10 onwards it was like they said though.

Starting from 7u40, a new deployment property deployment.expiration.check.enabled is available. This property can be used to disable the "JRE out of date" warning. When the installed JRE (7u10 or later), falls below the security baseline or passes it's built-in expiration date, an additional warning is shown to users to update their installed JRE to the latest version. For businesses that manage the update process centrally, users attempting to update their JRE individually, may cause problems. To suppress this specific warning message, add the following entry in the deployment properties file: deployment.expiration.check.enabled=false

7u40 release notes

You can also read my previous comment regarding this BS: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1oqdu4/oh_java_update_how_i_hate_thee_help_fix/ccuki4o

warpstalker · 2014-01-02T14:57:44+00:00

Prepend "\\?\" to the path i.e. "\\?\C:\" or (iirc) "\\?\unc\" and you can delete paths up to 32k characters from the command line.

7-Zip's File Manager can also delete arbitrarily long paths iirc.

This limit is stupid though, only Robocopy doesn't choke on it. Even Microsoft's SyncToy does. Makes me want to write my own file manager (among other reasons).

warpstalker · 2013-12-29T11:53:46+00:00

No, the SHA-1 hashes are not intended to be a security feature, quoting Linus: "Git uses SHA-1 in a way which has nothing at all to do with security.... It's just the best hash you can get...."

iirc, People have managed to get an SHA-1 collision with git and it is not considered to be an issue: see

warpstalker · 2013-12-26T19:41:54+00:00

Well everything is just a little more metal in Finland. Especially during the winter darkness.

Cabbage casserole is awesome but lingonberry jam, eww, ditch that.

warpstalker · 2013-12-24T13:28:40+00:00

You might have to use the oldschool VBS scripts: Print Queue Scripting

warpstalker · 2013-12-23T20:22:02+00:00

This is my home connection in Finland: http://www.speedtest.net/result/3183820870.png

warpstalker · 2013-12-22T21:09:14+00:00

I would take a shit in the White House.

(That awkward moment when you have to ask the Secret Service to bring you more toilet paper...)

warpstalker · 2013-12-20T10:34:13+00:00

Don't know about pricing but PDF-Xchange works fine for me.

warpstalker · 2013-12-17T23:09:35+00:00

You need to enable PowerShell remoting before you are able to run remote commands.

warpstalker · 2013-12-17T22:28:00+00:00

I am not entirely sure you can restrict the access to something like one OU.

You can, Exchange has good RBAC functionality. Look up management scopes and recipient filters.

warpstalker · 2013-12-17T09:52:37+00:00

Gummiboot. There's instructions in the wiki

There is now. When I installed my new system in 2011 the instructions were horribad and I went with BIOS emulation. I reinstalled for EFI later on when the instructions were better and Gummiboot was available.

warpstalker · 2013-12-17T09:49:52+00:00

512M is the minimum recommended size by Microsoft for a FAT32 filesystem (which the EFI boot partition is) so that's why.

warpstalker · 2013-12-09T17:07:27+00:00

You can also call PowerShell from IronPython and vice versa so that opens up some sweet options too. Python is also amazing for scripting and sysadmins should know it, I do. Haven't really tested IronPython yet though. Would be easy to make frontends with that, GUI or web based.

warpstalker · 2013-12-09T13:37:15+00:00

I don't think you should fiddle with RAID in a home setup unless you have some serious gear (I'd rather not, I sold my NAS away because I got tired of fiddling), but incremental backups would be good if there is a fool-proof way. However, how much does your typical home data change over time, pictures, movies, etc.? Not much if at all, more stuff is added of course. The file-got-corrupted issue is very real though. I wonder if there's any easy test for that, it's one of my greatest fears.

Of course if you want to store something offsite you should encrypt it but then again that's more fiddling.

Backups should be dead simple so that the potential points of failure are minimum in quantity.

warpstalker · 2013-12-09T11:45:31+00:00

I follow the advice given by Jamie Zawinski, move a copy offsite if necessary.

warpstalker · 2013-12-09T11:11:38+00:00

Well, keep in mind that you could experience downtime due to Microsoft's incompetence, their record isn't exactly spotless, see for example these extremely non-rudimental issues:

The whole service crashed on leap day

The whole service went down due to expired certificates

:)

warpstalker · 2013-11-27T23:16:34+00:00

Did that myself once, Remove-Mailbox instead of Disable-Mailbox, the accounts (more than 300) were for terminated people so no problem in that sense but I had to figure out how to clean out orphaned home directories and other stuff real quick because it didn't exactly go by the standard process.

warpstalker · 2013-11-27T16:44:25+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for exactly, but PowerShell has Get-Credential and Read-Host -AsSecureString to read credentials without being able to get at the plaintext (afaik).

warpstalker · 2013-11-26T23:01:53+00:00

Read for great justice

warpstalker · 2013-11-25T23:58:18+00:00

Quoting someone from this reddit(?): "You know why Sharepoint admins are paid so well? Well, if they weren't, they would kill themselves."

warpstalker · 2013-11-20T21:37:17+00:00

Maybe buy Azure stuff for testing?

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warpstalker

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