Windows 2008 (and 2008 R2) Tips

Just a small list of 2008(R2) command line tips and tricks for the every day admin.

Yum – List Only Security Updates

I’ve been really MS inundated at work lately with exchange 2010, UAG 2010, and Communicator deployments/migrations. So to balance my life a bit I better do a quick post of a linux hack 🙂 Here is a quick one I tacked together about 6 months ago. This will generate a detailed report of all the security updates you are missing with a description of what the update will fix. You will need the yum-security package installed for this to work.

ESX 4.0: Post-Install Script

Sure there are better ways to mass deploy ESX servers, but this way will save the one off farm deployment person some time 🙂 I took liberties in assuming you would be able to fill in the blanks for variables so or _VARIABLE_ will need to be replaced ad-lib style. Just for you my friend, served up proper on a hyper-link plate….. esx4_postinstall

BIG-IP: Load Balancer Upgrade

I had the pleasure of doing an F5 BIG-IP load balancer upgrade recently and am happy with the way the F5 people have designed their systems for fail over. Essentially you will use different system partitions to host different versions of their product and you change which one you want to boot to after updating the inactive partition. This, theoretically, means you can always go back to a working configuration if something goes awry. I’m unhappy with how fragmented their documentation is in getting from point A to point B though. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do…

Vmware: RVTools

This sly bastard wrote an excellent little .NET app for enumerating esx farm information. Any sysadmins working with VMware should definitely check this out. I really like the vHealth tab which will show possible zombie vmdks. Add the ability to export to csv and you have a nice tool for on the fly farm enumeration for the boss.

Go get RVTools now!