Monitor Windows services with PowerShell
Schedule a PowerShell script to monitor local services in your Windows Server environment
Sysadmins of the North
Technical SysOps blog, where topics include Sysadmin, DevOps, computers, servers, web, MySQL, database, virtualization, optimization and security
Sysadmins of the North
Technical SysOps blog, where topics include Sysadmin, DevOps, computers, servers, web, MySQL, database, virtualization, optimization and security
Jan Reilink
In my day to day work, I’m a systems administrator – DevOps / SRE and applications manager at Embrace – The Human Cloud. At Embrace we develop, maintain and host social intranets for our clients. Provide digital services and make working more efficient within various sectors.
Read why we can use your help and support ❤️
PowerShell Get-FsrmQuota and Set-FsrmQuota
To get and set File Server Resource Manager NTFS quota you now have to use PowerShell FileServerResourceManager cmdlets. It's pretty easy to get directory information with Get-FsrmQuota and change dirquota.exe using Set-FsrmQuota.
Set IIS Application Pool recycle defaults to Specific Times, not Regular Time Interval
By default, an IIS application pool (or "AppPool") recycles on a regular time interval of 1740 minutes, or 29 hours. One reason for this time interval is that application pools don't recycle at the same moment every day (every day at 07.00 for example).
PHP 5.6 default_charset change may break HTML output
A change in PHP's default_charset php.ini setting causes HTML output to break if you try to set a different charset in your HTML head. It also might break functions like htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars().
Turn off swap
Learn how to turn off swap in Bash, because when a swap partition is enabled Linux starts swapping, which may degrade (MySQL) system performance
Software deployment through WDS
Here is how to install software packages during a Windows Deployment Services (WDS) deployment, without Microsoft Deployment Workbench (available in the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, or MDT).
Monit monitoring on Ubuntu 14.04 VM on Hyper-V
In this post you’ll learn about setting up a Monit monitoring service for your websites and services. Monit is a free and open source service monitoring application which can perform various event-based actions. Monit can send email notifications, restart a…
How to play old games on Windows with DOSBox
PC retrogaming how-to for 64-bit Windows - and Linux!
Find all files owned by a particular user using PowerShell
Sometimes you need to find all files owned by a specific user, recursively on your Windows Server NTFS file system. PowerShell has some neat cmdlets to automate this task for you and here is how.
Disable WordPress comments (how-to)
With thousands spam reactions, disabling (and removing) WordPress comments is often the only way to go. Here is how to disable WordPress comments in both the WordPress Dashboard interface and in your MySQL / MariaDB database.
Disk Cleanup in Windows Server
Over time, as your Windows Server runs longer, more and more disk space is eaten. Simply gone! Investigating the disk usage leaves you clueless; there are no large log files, crash dumps, or there is no software to be removed. Where did that space go?
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) slows down outbound connections
ECN is an optional feature that may be used between two ECN-enabled endpoints when the underlying network infrastructure also supports it. Unfortunately, having one ECN Capability enabled endpoint may slow down outbound network connections to outdated network equipment.
“A domain rename operation is already in progress”
The other day, when I attempted to add a newly installed Active Directory to become the slave domain controller of a master, the error message “A domain rename operation is already in progress” was displayed. Promoting the Windows Server 2012…
Convert decimal to hex in Bash, hexadecimal to decimal and dates to Unix timestamp
Cconvert decimal to hex hexadecimal to decimal and Unix timestamps in Linux Bash. A quicky for my archives.
How to set a good PHP realpath_cache_size
Learn how to optimize PHP performance by checking and setting PHP realpath_cache_size. The realpath_cache_size size represents the total number of bytes in the path strings stored, plus the size of the data associated with the cache entry
Conditionally start Application Pools on remote IIS web servers
In this article you'll learn how to start all stopped application pools that have the ApplicationPool.AutoStart property set to $True using AppCmd.exe or PowerShell. This is something you often or occasionally have to perform on various servers, for example when an application pool hangs.
Check website availability with PHP and cURL
A useful PHP script to check if your website is up and online available. It uses PHP and cURL. This script comes in handy because website uptime and availability is important, and you want your website to be always online available.
Exploit PHP’s mail() to get remote code execution
Exploit PHP's mail() function for remote code execution. Apparently, if you are able to control the 5th parameter of the mail() function ($options), you have the opportunity to execute arbitrary commands.
Send authenticated SMTP email over TLS from WordPress
Learn how to override wp-mail() and send secure email using authenticated SMTP and StartTLS from WordPress.
Huge increase in WordPress xmlrpc.php POST requests
How to identify, block, mitigate and leverage xmlrpc.php scans, brute-force, and user enumeration attacks on WordPress sites... Secure WordPress xmlprc.php interface and reduce service disruption.
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