six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2014-02-26

A Bar Graph for the PowerShell Console

As a sysadmin I frequently have the need to get an overview of the utilization of particular system resources (disk space or memory for instance). Visualizing the numbers greatly helps with spotting bottlenecks.

One way to visualize data with PowerShell are DataVisualization objects in Windows Forms, which are rather versatile, but not exactly what I would consider straightforward. They also might be overkill for various tasks. The current usage of a system resource for instance could easily be displayed with a bar graph in a text console.

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Posted 23:38 [permalink]

2014-02-16

Create a Local Yum Repository

When setting up RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS systems I always find it handy to have a local repository with the RPMs from the install media. On hosts without Internet connection it saves me the trouble of having to shuffle install media around whenever I need to install an additional package after the system was initially set up. Even if the host is configured to use an online repository, keeping a local repository doesn't hurt except for a little extra disk space, which is cheap enough these days.

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Posted 16:30 [permalink]

Check the Last User Logon

As a system administrator you're sometimes tasked with finding out who the last person logged into a particular computer was, or when a particular person was last logged in on some computer(s).

Windows records this information in the Security eventlog when you enable auditing account logon events.

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Posted 16:03 [permalink]