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Month: July 2019

QuickTip – One-Time Scheduled CentOS (and Other Linux Distros) Server Reboot

QuickTip – One-Time Scheduled CentOS (and Other Linux Distros) Server Reboot

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Let’s say that you ran some updates on your CentOS server but can’t reboot it until a later time, like when users have gone home for the day. Run this simple command to schedule the server to reboot at a certain time. In this case, 8 PM. sudo shutdown -r 20:00 As indicated in the confirmation received after running the command, you can use this command to override and cancel the scheduled reboot, you can run this command- sudo shutdown…

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DNF-Automatic – Schedule Updates for Fedora (and other Linux distros)

DNF-Automatic – Schedule Updates for Fedora (and other Linux distros)

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If you want to have Fedora (and other rpm-based distros) update itself, you can use DNF-Automatic. First, we’ll need to install it. I’ll assume that this is a fresh server and you decided to login as root to get everything configured. # dnf -y install dnf-automatic Now that it is installed, we will edit the automatic.conf config file with nano- # nano /etc/dnf/automatic.conf You will notice that there are several sections. Each section has a description of the options and…

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QuickTip – Need to Check the Active Connections to Your Squid Proxy Server?

QuickTip – Need to Check the Active Connections to Your Squid Proxy Server?

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If you want to update and reboot your Squid proxy server, you might want to check to see if there are active connections. Run this netstat command with grep to check all the active connections on your squid proxy port. netstat -na | grep :3128 If you only see this result, no one is currently connected- When at least one device is connected, you will see something like this-

VMWare PowerCLI – Backup ESXi Host Configuration

VMWare PowerCLI – Backup ESXi Host Configuration

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I had been using a version of this script to backup my VMWare ESXi host configurations for several years and across several versions of ESXi and vCenter server. This script was connecting to my vCenter Server (at 192.168.0.9) and downloading the configurations to a network share (at 192.168.0.62). It would also cycle the files in and out (deleting old backups) in a First-In-First-Out scheme. Param ( [string]$VIServer = “192.168.0.9”, [string]$ConfigPath = “\\192.168.0.62\backups\ESXiHosts\”, [int]$Days = 21 ) If (-not (Get-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core…

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QuickTip – Need to Clear DNS Cache on a Remote System?

QuickTip – Need to Clear DNS Cache on a Remote System?

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I have been using PDQ Deploy in central server mode and have had an occasional issue when deploying new systems, where the name and/or IP address is changed (say from a wired to wireless network) and the PDQ deploy server still has the DNS name and IP cached. Obviously, running – IPConfig /flushdns will only clear the cache on your local system. But, the problem is that the PDQ Deploy server needs to have its DNS cache cleared. Run this…

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PSWindowsUpdate – Use PowerShell (and other tools) to Automate Windows Updates

PSWindowsUpdate – Use PowerShell (and other tools) to Automate Windows Updates

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I was searching for a way to further automate new Windows system deployments. One thing I kept running into was Windows updating. I have refined and added automation to my process over the past several years. For Windows 10 clients, my current deployment process involves an MDT/WDS server that has a stock Windows 10 wim file. To customize the deployments, I have a collection of GPOs and PDQDeploy packages for software installation and some other GPOs for policies. I recognized…

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