Volume Shadow Service - Part1

I was reading about VSS (Volume Shadow copy Services) in the 70-290 Microsoft book CH7 lesson 3. Lets say you have an environment with a high number of users modifying data 24/7. You WILL have tickets logged to the helpdesk for restoration purposes. Someone may overwrite or delete a file and need it back rather quickly. Rather than pull tapes from offsite locations which takes precious time, I am looking into utilizing VSS due to it's simplicity and quick file restoration qualities. You can schedule a snapshot of sorts of the shares you specify on a daily basis and if a user deletes a file you can restore the file in minutes within Windows!

I have a test system setup here in my office running a .local domain. This is enabled at the %systemroot% properties under Volume Shadow. Currently I have created the test shares and am creating files and folders for this practice...

Windows Powershell

I have recently been told about a utility which allows one to manage tasks on a domain with little to no scripting experience. It's called Windows Powershell. It's available on Microsoft's website and you must have .Net 2.0 installed to use it. It is basically a command prompt with the ability to execute WMI commands along with the typical commands one would use in a Dos box. There is a repository on Microsoft's website with examples of these commands. If you are a domain admin but lack the VBscipting experience, this is defiately something you should look into.

Five things I love most in Windows

Yay kids! It's soapbox time!

1. I love it when I'm surfing multiple pages online and I start to read or type into one website and the other one says "Oh! Hey! I'm loaded!" and proceeds to place itself in front of what I am doing. Popups my nerdy arse, Internet Explorer is a popup!

2. I love it when I type a username into a given application or site and start to type the password and then halfway into the password Windows decides to place the cursor back in the username field as I complete the PW. Yeah...THANKS FOR THAT !! Now my password is known to anyone hovering over my shoulder like that guy in your office, yeah him or them, you know who they are...

3. On the topic of games, I love how these keyboards have the nice little handy-dandy Windows key on them. It is so useful .... FOR KICKING ME TO WINDOWS IN THE MIDDLE OF AN INTENSE BF2142 ROUND when I meant to hit the CTRL key!!

4. Windows: "Eat my updates or DIE!!! Die a horrible death of incessant bubbles and annoying 4th grade popping sounds! HA!"

5. Last but not least (this list could go on and on but I'm tired) is when I am browsing through files and folders and accidently click-drag a folder into a myriad of possible nother other folders in which I have to stop what I was doing and search for the missing folder or file because it would be too easy to code a "Hey noob are you sure you want to move this file?" into the OS. (HINT BLOODY HINT HINT MICROSOFT!!)

MCSE and the New Year

So I'm still studying for the 290 exam, I've read through the 1st ed. book now I am almost done with the 2nd edition covering R2 and other new components such as WSUS (Windows Software Update Services). Turns out we won't have the study group I had mentioned earlier due to some complications in business. My new years resolution will be to have my MCSE by the end of the year. This (70-290) is supposedly the easiest of the 7 exams. We shall see!

I am also reading the Cisco CCNA self-study books as much as possible in between BF2142 and Oblivion :-)

Other than that there isn't much going on. Work is slow and the kids are growing at superhuman speeds!

Update

Well it has been pretty slow at work lately, I feel I should write about something though. Most of my free time is being spent playing BF2142 and Oblivion (Elder Scrolls). I think the concept of combining FPS with stat and rank tracking is genius, and part of EA's master plan to take over the planet. It's very addicting! As far as Oblivion is concerned, well, you do the math...huge world, fantasy setting, do whatever you want, beautiful graphics, huge world etc etc. Did I mention the scope of that game is ginormous?

Anyway, I am going to join a study group at work to get my MCSE cert. Pretty clever plan actually, out of 4 or 5 people one will grab a couple of chapters and become 'the expert' on that topic and the rest will take their own piece of the pie and we all get together and chat about the important points and look over notes etc. Hope it works out, we shall see...

BTW - If you haven't checked out Ctrl-Alt-Delete's website before, please do yourself and your funny-bone a favor by clicking this link. Trust me, if you are a geek at heart who loves games you will laugh reading this web-comic and enough content to keep you going back for days. I know, I've read them all :-p