Check out this walkthough by Lee Holmes, fellow Softie and author of Windows PowerShell Cookbook: for Windows, Exchange 2007, and MOM V3 .

On an internal PowerShell scripting DL the question was posed as to how one would get a list of applications with firewall exceptions. Here was the answer that I sent: function getfwexceptions { $fwmgr = ( new - object -com hnetcfg.fwmgr).localpolicy...

The internal wireless on one of my laptops (an HP Pavillion dv9005us which appear to have a recall ) decided to stop working sometime back. I had already sent this thing back to have the system board replaced once before because the LAN connection lost...

Currently I work on building large scale web services that face the the public as part of what Microsoft calls software plus services ( Software+Services ). In this area of Internet facing applications all aspects of security are important, including...

Did you know that you can access and even run Sysinternals tools right from the Internet? http://live.sysinternals.com/ I tend to use them like this... C:\utils>pushd \\live.sysinternals.com Z:\>strings /accepteula c:\utils\stringtest...

Earlier this week one of my co-workers asked me to look at a virtual machine he had which was crashing frequently; and by frequently I mean around 40 times since 11/25. I already knew that the stop code was 0xA (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) and found out that...

Well, we've come to the end of the road with the OneCare product. It was a great product packed with neat features that made PC use carefree. Frankly, I'm sad to see it go but it's nice to see that Microsoft is going to offer a free solution. At any rate...

A couple of months ago a friend of mine asked me to take a look at an IT job posting that they were going to go for. Being the good buddy that I am I followed the instructions to find the description but was confronted with a runtime error on each page...

Last week I was trying to get prints of some photos I had from a good friend's wedding. I had success with Internet photo printing before at a different store so I decided to use the service offered by a nearby store for quick pickup. I go to the website...

There have been cases where I wanted to instrument my app and have the ability to log extensive diagnostic information to a file, starting a new file each day or after the file reached a certain size. When this is necessary I end up finding myself using...

I know that it's been quite a while since I have written a blog. I have been plenty busy up here in the Pac-Northwest. Since my last post I have moved into new condo and back to the Server & Tools group to work in my original group - OneCare. Now...

Since patching is currently on the brain I thought that I'd also include this little VBScript that I wrote a while back to do a quick 'n dirty patch validation. The script takes two arguments 1) a file with the servers to target (one per line) and 2)...

To some of you the second Tuesday of each month is just another day, but to the rest of us this day is known as "patch Tuesday". The second Tuesday of each month is when Microsoft releases security updates for it's products to the world. Our group previously...

The last few weeks have been a blur; in part because I took a mini-vacation, but the majority of my time has been spent trying to do my part to get a few of our flagship products out the door. It was a long, hard, and painful road to the release of Windows...

Over the years I‘ve dealt with a number of technologies and expensive devices that do funny things with network traffic. None of them really made me smile; you know what I mean if you’ve ever tried to read a book titled “Telecommunication Traffic Engineering...

Hi, my name is Bryan Griffin. The purpose for my blog is to share some of my knowledge and thoughts on technology. Over the years I have learned a great deal, from both the large complex environments and brilliant people that I've had the pleasure of...

As we went through the dogfood process for Longhorn Server we understood that once we hit RC0 the Windows Firewall would be enabled by default, blocking all unsolicited inbound connections. This particular situation posed a small problem for our group...