Issues With Configuring Powershell ExecutionPolicy via Group Policy

When you publish an ExecutionPolicy for Powershell via Group Policy, several issues will crop up. The first I came across is that it breaks several of the Best Practices Analyzers. The second is that it breaks some of the Exchange 2010 installers.


The Case of the Silverlight Video Lockup

I came home to a computer unwilling to play video today. Netflix would launch the silverlight player, determine my video quality, buffer 5-30% of the video, then hard hang my computer. I couldn't even get CrashOnCtrlScroll to work so I could try using WinDbg to determine what was causing the hang.


Querying Peak Commit Bytes with Powershell (via NtQuerySystemInformation)

One of the more interesting values to determine how much memory to allocate a machine is the Peak Committed Bytes. This value is available as "Commit Charge (K) - Peak" from Windows 2003 Task Manger and from Sysinternals Process Explorer and is a good representation of the maximum amount of memory that has been used at once since the computer was last rebooted. Wikipedia has more details about the Commit Charge numbers if you want to read more.




(Not) Using PowerShell v2 to View WSMan Data From ESX

Today I was trying to get at my "Health Status" data on my ESX servers though PowerShell using the tutorial posted on the PowerCLI Blog (Monitoring ESX Hardware with Powershell), but I kept getting an "Access Denied" message. I did a little more research into using WSMan in PowerShell and discovered that before V2, there was a way to use a COM object to query WSMan that gave you a little more control over the connection (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.11.heyscriptingguy.aspx).


Adding a Custom Certificate to McAfee ePO Server 4.0 (Apache)

Our ePO adminitrators came to me asking for help installing an enterprise certificate on our new ePO 4.0 server so they could provide a vanity dns name for management to view reports. According to McAfee, this is not supported in 4.0, but will be a feature of 4.5. Knowing that ePO runs on Tomcat, I was pretty confident that I could get it working anyway… just remember that none of this is supported. If you need a supported solution on 4.0, I recommend adding the self signed certificate to your domain certificate trust list and using the computer name to access the site.