Welcome to dave.harris.net, glad you could make it!

If you haven't guessed, I'm Dave Harris and I'll happily blog about anything, but you'll find a lot of sysadmin stuff, X10 and home automation, product reviews, hedgehog related stuff, DIY and car stuff on here.

Hopefully you will find some of it interesting and possibly even helpful, if you do, perhaps you could buy me a beer or a coffee (see links on right), nobody has yet, but I'm sure one day it will happen!

Have a look around and let me know what you think. Cheers, Dave.

Scheduled task to send an email when a domain user account is locked out

We don’t have that many users right now and so I decided to setup an email alert to be sent to me when a user account is locked out. Essentially it’s pretty simple, here’s what I did. First, head over to your Scheduled …

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SQL Script to show available space for all Databases

Quick little script to return the space available on all databases. I linked this into PRTG Network Monitor to make sure that none of them were too low.

Powershell Script to check all Automatic Services with PRTG Network Monitor

I can check specified services with PTRG, but also wanted a a way to make sure all automatic services were running on a remote server. My first attempt at a script for this was: $machinename=$args[0] $sscount = 0 $ss = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter “StartMode=’Auto’ AND State=’Stopped’” -computer $machinename foreach ($objItem in $ss) { $sscount++ …

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Removing the “Do you trust this printer” message box

When changing printers recently  I noticed when testing that users would receive the following message: This was a bit of a pain so I set about looking to remove this via Group Policy. The option I settle on was documented here, but basically involved adding the following …

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PPTP VPN on Windows 8 through Cisco ASA5510

I came across this error on my Windows 8 VDI, basically I couldn’t create a PPTP VPN Connection to an external site. I tried the same connection from a separate WiFi connection and it worked perfectly, leading me to think that something on the …

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SQL 2012 DPM Backup Failure – The SQL Server instance refused the connection

Some of my DPM Backups on a new 2012 box were failing with the error The fix can be found here and is pretty straight forward. Add the account NT_AUTHORITY\System to have sysadmin priviledges within SSMS. Once added you should receive no more …

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Creating Temporary VM Pools for Server O/S’s using RDV_ROLLBACK

I had a situation where some users needed a temporary machine, mostly for creating documentation and taking screenshots on a fresh install that hadn’t been modified. I created a desktop pool for some Windows 7 and Windows 8 VM’s and set them …

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Server 2012 Virtual Desktop Collection Save Delay

I finally figured out what this option was when configuring a virtual desktop collection. It basically will save the virtual machine if it has been inactive for the specified number of minutes. Seems pretty obvious now, a bot more documentation …

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Error Connecting to TMG server with PRTG

When attempting to add a TMG server to PRTG, the following error was thrown up: “RPC Server not accessible” To resolve this, in TMG add a new rule for TMG Access from the monitoring server. Select it and go to “Configure …

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