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Hacktoberfest 2020

In this crazy year that is 2020, I have made some time to participate in my second Hacktoberfest. This is a yearly event sponsored by Digital Ocean and DEV all about promoting the open source software community.

Enable Copy on Select in Windows Terminal

If you are coming from using any *nix terminal to Windows Terminal, there is probably one feature you are really missing. Copy on select, immediately copying any text you highlight to the clipboard, is not enabled by default.

Format a Linux USB or SD Card Using Windows

You may have noticed that if you connect a disk with Linux partitions to your Windows box, that you cannot view all of the files or the size of the drive seems to be reported incorrectly. Here is a super quick way to format a Linux USB drive or SD card on a Windows PC using Diskpart so that it can be repurposed.

Get a Windows PC Serial Number via Command-line

I just wanted to share a quick way to pull a Windows PC’s serial number via Cmd prompt or Powershell. You can do this by using the WMI command-line utility as follows:

Upgrade Ubuntu from the Command-line

Here is the quick down and dirty on how to upgrade Ubuntu via the command line. If you have a firewall or an older version installed, then there may be some additional steps involved. Listed below is simply the bare minimum process from 16.04 forward.

Siri Shortcut to Disable Pi-hole

Pi-hole is great at blocking ads and protecting you on the internet. However, you occasionally may need to disable it for a few minutes so you can click on that sketchy link at the top of your Google search. In this quick post, I will walk you through how to set up a Siri Shortcut button on your iPhone to temporarily disable PiHole.

Setup Custom SSH Profiles in Windows Terminal

Windows 10 has OpenSSH support that is now enabled by default as of version 1803. To make quick use of this feature you can create custom options in Windows Terminal’s drop-down menu. We will do this by adding a new profile to the Windows Terminal settings file. If you have not yet installed Windows Terminal follow the instructions in this post first to get started.

How to Install Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a new terminal emulator developed by Microsoft for Windows 10. The current release is still in Preview but is quite stable. Let’s quickly run through how to get it setup and configured. Note: you will need to be running Windows 10 version 18362.0 (1903) or higher to install this.

How to Setup Windows Subsystem for Linux

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) provides you with a handy Bash shell running directly in Windows 10 without the need for a local virtual machine or a remote host. This allows you to install and run many Linux command-line tools from the comfort of your Windows desktop. For stability purposes, I recommend being on at least the Fall Creator’s Update for Windows 10 (1709) before continuing with the installation instructions below.

Use PowerShell to List VMs that Need Tools or Hardware Updated

This PowerShell script will help you easily determine what VM hardware version each of your VMs are currently running. Updating your VM hardware compatibility version can offer you benefits like supporting new CPU architectures, helping you squeeze every last bit of performance out of your VMs.

Setting up DuckDNS in a Docker Container

DuckDNS is a free dynamic DNS service that will point a subdomain of duckdns.org to an IP of your choice. This IP can then be updated using a scripted process on a client machine. The most common application for this is to provide an easy to remember name to use for accessing a home lab/server as often a user’s ISP will regularly change their external IP address.

Coding My First WoW Addon

So you wanna make your own WoW addon? Let’s walk through the most basic steps to get you started!

Fix SCOM Health Rollup States for Distributed Apps

If you have a large collection of distributed applications in your SCOM environment, chances are you have run into an issue where many or all of your apps are reporting an incorrect health rollup state. Most likely you have an individual SCOM management server that is having a bad day and happens to be responsible for monitoring a portion of your distributed apps, synthetics for example.

Increase the Max Number of Simultaneous Runbook Executions

Are you a really heavy Orchestrator user? You may have a problem you don’t even know about, particularly if you only have a single runbook server. Microsoft has chosen to set the maximum number of runbooks that a runbook server can execute at once to 50 as a default. Herein lies the issue, if your deployment would regularly surpass this number then you may begin seeing slow execution times, queueing, and potentially SQL blocking.

Use Google Assistant to Add Items to Trello Boards

Since I decided to set up my Google Home Mini in my office I thought it would be handy to be able to ask it to log ideas for blog posts. I am currently using a Trello board to track all my ideas for posts and luckily IFTTT has services for both Trello and Google Assistant. The Google Assistant service is especially nice as it allows you to setup trigger phrases as well as accept variable voice input following it. This input can easily be passed along to another service to build some pretty creative and powerful applets.

Add External Services to Google Assistant

Unfortunately, Google’s approach to setting up external services is a little convoluted compared to the Alexa skill system. During setup you are prompted to add your accounts for media services like Netflix and Spotify. Now let’s say you want to setup your thermostats so that you can control those with Google Assistant, that’s not quite as straightforward.

Get a Free Google Home Mini from Spotify

Update: Spotify is offering this again for the 2019 holiday season until 11/15, and it is now available for Individual as well as Family Premium plans.

Add User as Admin for Windows Azure Pack Portal

Have you setup Windows Azure Pack to use SMA and are stuck trying to figure out how to grant other team members Admin access to the portal? Though unintuitive, it is actually quite simple with some quick PowerShell:

Knowledge Bombs

Knowledge Bombs are a quick tips series of short posts that I plan to keep around the 1 minute read time mark. I plan to cover basic knowledge of various topics, tech updates such as major vulnerabilities\patches, and quick fixes for common issues.

About

Hi there, I’m Matt! I am a Sys Admin by day, a wanna be dev by night, and mainly here to drop some knowledge bombs for you. I decided that while building a reference for myself, it would be fun to share with the community. I hope to provide some useful content to help you through the daily grind. As a Systems Administrator, I spend the majority of my work days with Microsoft’s System Center Suite along with products from VMware and Citrix. I typically spend a lot of time automating the mundane to save sanity and $$. On the dev side of things, I use PowerShell almost daily, but I also spend time working with SQL, JavaScript, and a handful of other web front-end languages. I am also learning Swift so that I can begin work on a mobile app that I have on the back burner.

Matt S

Posts by Category

Admin Adventures

Knowledge Bombs

Dev Dungeon

Home Automation