In the past, VMware Tools installed within a Windows guest offered several options via the GUI of the system tray icon. Starting with Workstation version 9 and ESXi version 5.1, the old options are no longer present.
Some of the features available via the GUI in the past are still present using the VMwareToolboxCMD.exe application. The “help” switch will display some available options.
The Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer Tool is a companion to the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer web site. The utility provides the ability to run connectivity diagnostics for five common connectivity symptoms directly from a local computer and save results in an HTML format.
To change network firewall profiles within Windows 8 using PowerShell (such as going from Public to Private), use the following command to list all network interfaces and the current values.
Get-NetConnectionProfile
To modify the profile, use the following command including the network interface to change and the new value.
Set-NetConnectionProfile -InterfaceAlias Ethernet -NetworkCategory Private
To create a report of when user account’s passwords have expired with Quest’s AD cmdlets, use the following command. By sorting by ParentContainer, the output should be grouped by Organizational Units.
Get-QADUser -SizeLimit 5000 | Select LogonName, ParentContainer, LastLogon, PasswordLastSet, PasswordExpires | Sort ParentContainer, PasswordExpires | Export-CSV report.csv
Rsnapshot is a file system snapshot utility written in Perl for making backups of local and remote systems with Unix-based systems.
PowerShell has an option similar to the Tail command with Linux/Unix to monitor log files. The syntax to use is:
Get-Content logfilename –Tail number of lines to return
Applications within the Office 2013 suite by default have a start screen. To disable this with Word, launch a new blank document. Click on File – Options.
Within the Startup options area, disable the Start screen item. The same procedure can be used with other applications within the suite such as Excel.
