Enterprise Microsoft Q&A: Hello for Buttprint

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Enterprise Microsoft Q&A: Hello for Buttprint

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Responding to Noel's question from a couple pages ago.

The first thing that comes to mind is a Powershell script. (God I love Powershell.) Would it be feasible to get all your workstation names into a text file, one per line? Then you could do something like this to find the profile sizes. (I'm just doing this off the top of my head so the code probably isn't perfect, but you should get the idea:

code:

$file = Get-Content "file.txt"
ForEach{$_ in $file
  Get-ChildItem "\\$_\c$\users\" -Recurse | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum
}

You'll probably have to fiddle with the escape characters and such... but that would return the size of all the junk under the users directory (or "Documents and Settings" for XP I guess, for each computer in your list. Then you could just use the script to add all that stuff up, convert it to GB, whatever floats your boat...

I did this exact same thing a while back because we wanted to know about how much space we'd need to store roaming profiles in a central location. The problem with this approach is duplication of data. Like if Sally has logged in to several of the machines that you're scanning, you'd end up counting her profile three times in your results.

Noel posted:

The tools I have available for these questions are SCCM and a Server2008 domain.

I want to discover the size of the local profiles on the desktops in my organization - I'm curious how much storage we would need if we used roaming profiles. I know that in the System control panel it tells me, but I'm not sure where that is stored. I suppose I could use a script + mof edit. Or File Collection.

I also want to parse the contents of each computer's local administrators group. Preferably this would be stored with each computer in SCCM (in the same way it currently shows what AD groups each computer is in). This one might also turn out to be a script + mof edit.

Spudman fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Feb 10, 2011

# ¿ Feb 10, 2011 17:09

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 20:45

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Well, I hope this thread does well. I'm a Windows enterprise administrator myself, and because I have no life I browse SHSC for fun, and this thread excites me.

My company has about 250 employees, a headquarters office, a primary datacenter, and a disaster recovery datacenter. For a year now, we have been in the process of migrating from a Windows 2000 domain to a Windows 2008 domain. The old domain was set up long ago by someone who thought it'd be swell if he made it a single-label domain name. There is no trust relationship between the two domains. Users that I've migrated to the new domain are interspersed throughout the company... literally, the person in the office next to mine is in a different domain. The non-IT people don't see the benefits of migrating to the new domain, despite my proselytizing. They don't want the inconvenience, and there are legacy apps in the old domain that won't run on 2k8... the developers of said programs all left the company years ago.

Alas, they hold all the political power.

I have SCOM, WSUS, WDS, and DPM all running, but I really would like to try SCCM. But I have a dedicated desktop/workstation guy, so I don't really think about desktop administration too much.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2011 23:40

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

I have 6 DCs and 3 sites, 2 DCs per site. Each DC is Windows 2008 x64... I'm considering performing an adprep /forestprep and /domainprep on my live environment so that I can begin introducing 2008 R2 DCs into the mix. I don't really foresee any problems, but anyone have any experience with this and have any considerations before I go loving up our domain?

(Update resume, leave town...)

# ¿ Mar 3, 2011 13:36

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Alright, alright... I'm just a careful administrator, give me a break!

edit: I don't really feel like it's overkill to have two 2DCs... the load is spread across the DCs pretty well, it's a 24/7 production environment, and the sites are far apart, so if a DC goes down at a site, it's nice to know that I can run on the other one until I have time to drive the 50 miles out there to fix it.

Spudman fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Mar 3, 2011

# ¿ Mar 3, 2011 15:20

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

I actually don't plan on raising the functional levels at all. At least not right now. Just upgrade the DCs. Is it completely 100% necessary? No, but obviously it's thinking toward the future since Microsoft's future endeavors are all going to be focused on R2. Plus I have a DC at each site right now with WDS on it... and the R2 version of WDS is so much better than the 2k8 one. Just set up WDS on a member server and leave your DCs alone, you say? Well I'd be doing the upgrade eventually anyway... but thanks for allaying my paranoia.

edit: Also, you can't put a 2k8 DC into an NT domain. You could put it into a 2000 domain, but not until you forestprep and domainprep. Raising functional levels is a separate issue altogether.

FISHMANPET posted:

If you're that paranoid, you don't need to upgrade the functional level to add 2008 R2 DCs, they'll just operate at 2008 functional level. Hell, you can join a 2008 DC to an NT domain and keep it at the NT functional level.

Also, I don't think you can raise the functional level to anything higher than the lowest DC, so you'd have to replace all your 2008 DCs to raise to R2.

Spudman fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Mar 3, 2011

# ¿ Mar 3, 2011 15:58

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

My first instinct would be using an IP-helper setting in the router to forward the broadcasts, but this is a half-baked idea and probably is not at all the solution. (Edit: might search for an RRAS / DHCP Relay solution instead.)

I get interesting errors every once in a while with PXE/WDS too. For instance, when booting up, the host will contact the DHCP server and get an address that is then displayed on the screen as WDS loads... then once WinPE has loaded, it will then inform me that it failed to get a DHCP address and force me to reboot. But, wait... how did you even boot WinPE in the first place if you didn't have an IP address? Then on the next reboot, everything will go just fine. So it's an intermittent issue. My favorite kind.

Spudman fucked around with this message at 14:41 on May 9, 2011

# ¿ May 9, 2011 13:11

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Nebulis01 posted:

As for the WDS/DHCP Error. When you load into WinPE it reinits the network stack and forces it to get another DHCP address. We had this issue on Dell Optiplex 745/755 machines with the onboard Intel Gigabit NIC. We ended up having to enable spanning tree port fast on all of our switch ports in order to fix it.

I'm not a networking guy so I'm not entirely sure what that did but it did resolve the issue for us.

Thank you, I think you very well may have put me on the right path to finally fixing this issue.

# ¿ May 9, 2011 15:25

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Server Core's alright. After the initial set up, you can remotely manage practically every aspect of it via MMC on another system, so you're not just confined to a CLI all the time. Plus, don't let anyone convince you that it has any performance benefits. People instinctively think that just because it doesn't have a GUI that it's going to be faster. I've actually seen virtual machines perform worse on Core than on a normal installation of R2 Enterprise. (I assume because of additional security measures on Core?) Its only real advantage is "offering a smaller attack surface" for security reasons. So I basically agree with the above poster, it usually isn't worth the hassle.

# ¿ May 12, 2011 15:05

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Again, the advantage of Core is not that it's any "leaner" or "faster" simply because it doesn't have a GUI and that was never intended to be its selling point. It's all about security.

Proper server RAM is relatively cheap compared to what it has been, but I'm not sure I'd call it "dirt loving cheap." It's not the same stuff you buy off of Newegg and put in your desktop PC. If I remember correctly, a couple months ago I had a box of 768GB of RAM for Proliant G7's come through that was about $10k. That can be prohibitive if you're not working for a large enterprise.

And I wouldn't advise putting "dozens" of VMs on a single 2 processor server either. The current "rule of thumb" is 4 to 6 VMs per processing core, depending of course on what those VMs are doing. Regardless, your bottleneck will surely be disk I/O anyway.

edit: I'm going to get nailed for trying to quote a "rule of thumb," I can feel it coming. I guess I'm just conservative because we have relatively "busy" VMs in my organization.

Nomex posted:

Full blown Windows runs pretty lean by today's standards. You can pile dozens of Windows machines on a single 2 processor server with enough ram. Ram is dirt loving cheap now as well. You can jam 128GB in a server for chump change. With modern storage tech you can de-duplicate your virtual machines down to nothing too. There's almost no point to running server core anymore.

Spudman fucked around with this message at 23:55 on May 17, 2011

# ¿ May 17, 2011 23:47

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 20:45

Spudman: Feb 5, 2004; Post nudes plz
Don't worry, it's perfectly rational!

Drumstick posted:

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to remove a field from AD users? I have an unknown number of users whose website points to a sharepoint site, but we are getting rid of it. I would like to clear it out, but it wasnt added in consistently.

Yeah, you could use a script with DSMOD in it to make the field blank, but assuming I understand your question correctly, it is impossible to completely delete a field from an AD schema. You can disable it, but never completely delete it. That's one of the reasons Microsoft makes it more difficult to even get to the schema editor, because you really don't want to mess it up.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2011 20:16

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