Sometimes I find that simple tasks like creating a shortcut to an Application using a script are not straight forward. Looking for a simple way to place a shortcut on multiple users desktops using a Powershell script lead me to tools like mklink (which creates symbolic links, but not shortcuts).
surprisingly, I did not find a straight forward method to accomplish this.
However, I did find a way to create shortcuts using VBScript. Being more of a Powershell guy, I decided to convert this to a Powershell function in order to be able to reuse it as I see fit.
Migrating an old VMWare Vcenter environment to newer vcsa 6.5 can be challenging. In the process I found myself doing other tasks like converting RDMs (Mapped Raw LUN) to .vmdk files.
Migrating RDMs attached to virtual machines on my Vcenter 5.5 environment to .vmdk disk files appeared like a tedious handy task especially when you have these LUNs attached to many ESXi hosts. With the help of powershell and Powercli the task becomes much easier.
In this post I recomposed (Source:Ian Farr) a Powershell script which will ask for the locked user account name and then will scan the active directory DCs security log for relevant events and will present the user lock time and source of the lock out like so:
How to: Find the source of Account Lockouts in Active Directory
It is a very common problem in Active Directory when Users change their password in a domain environment, they might get locked out repeatedly and it can be a frustrating process to identify the source of the lockout.
Try the following steps to track the locked out user and also find the source of AD account lockouts. This procedure assume that you know the username which is locked out.
Using the ESXi command-line utility vim-cmd to power off the virtual machine
SSH into your ESXi server
Get a list of all registered virtual machines, identified by their VMID, Display Name and path to the .vmx configuration file by running this command: vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
Get the current state of a virtual machine by running this command:
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.getstate VMID
Shutdown the virtual machine using the VMID found in Step 2 and run this command:
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.shutdown VMID
If the virtual machine fails to shut down, run this command:
