Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Glo Networks team sharing their technical experiences and thoughts.

Diskeeper for Hyper-V

2009 May 30 – 7:13 am

diskeeperlogo So Diskeeper are still around and now launching a tool for Defraging Hyper-V machines (both guest and host).

I wonder how many people remember the days of defraging their Windows 9x boxes and watching the little bars move around, feeling great when everything looked tidy and then knowing the machine felt faster when using it ? So my next question is how many people still defrag and does it really make any serious difference ? The last few times I’ve tried it on various machines over the years I’ve noticed no visable difference at all. Just an hour or so wasted waiting for the machine to finish doing the defrag so I can get back to using it :) .

Of course the likes of diskeeper will through great stats at you about how much it makes things quicker. But in the real world does defraging have much of a place anymore ?

More importantly am I bothered enough or do I believe it may have a real difference enough to actualy bother installing it again and see if there’s a difference ….. ?

More info from Diskeeper themselves here.


Windows live folder share

2008 October 3 – 5:01 pm

 

 

 

Got more than one computer you want your files on?

Windows Live FolderShare allows you to sync folders to all your computers, you can also use it to share files with freinds and family. It works on both the PC and Mac and can sync files up to 2GB.

All you need is a Windows live account, go here and download the software, its free.


IE Compatibility in FireFox

2008 September 17 – 9:50 pm

Many of our customers (that includes most of our engineers) use Firefox as our main web browser. There are some sites that just run better in Microsofts Internet Explorer (IE) and some that just don’t run at all without it. I just spotted a plug in for IE that lets you run IE as a tab within FireFox.

Get hold of ietab here. Great stuff and it works perfectly too.

Pitty there’s no OS X version but it makes sense I suppose :) .



For many of our customers we redirect a user’s My Documents to a directory of the same name, on a Windows share. For example, the user ‘JMcMuffin’ may have their My Docs redirected to “\\FILESERVER\Home\JMcMuffin\My Documents”, which are stored in a local path of D:\Data\Users\JMcMuffin, on FILESERVER. Obviously you can switch \\FILESERVER\Home for a DFS share, etc.

In some instances you might have a significant number and for whatever reason the permissions may have been altered, and the Group Policy defaults don’t quite suit your requirements. Or maybe you’re transfering these files to a new server, in a different domain. I can’t image you want to do the whole thing by hand.

In days of old we’d sort this with a batch script and it would be ok, but might take a while to run. Powershell has changed things though. The script we’ve popped together (below) runs lightning quick in comparison, and we thought someone else might also find it useful.

Just save it in a ps1 file, and invoke it from powershell, providing your directory path that you want to “fix”.

To use our example from above, you’d call the script on FILESERVER, from powershell:

PS C:\Users\Karl> C:\path\to\scripts\fix-perms.ps1 “D:\Data\Users”

The script would then go over each directory and try and add that user to the ACL with Modify rights – i.e. the JcMcMuffin user to the D:\Data\Users\JMcMuffin directory.

In our scenario we required ourselves, another group, SYSTEM and each user to have access only – So we pushed the common permissions from the parent, and then ran the script to add the individual users.

# Fix-Perms
# Iterates over all child directories, and adds the user, with the same name as the directory, to the ACL with modify rights
# Usage:
# Fix-Perms “C:\Path\To\Directory”
# Or, for the current directory
# Fix-Perms “.”

# our parameters, throw a warning if we get none
param (
[string] $dirpath = $(throw “Please specify the full path to the directory!”)
)

# get list of all child directories, in the current directory
$directories = dir $dirpath | where {$_.PsIsContainer}

# iterate over the directories
foreach ($dir in $directories)
{
# echo out what the full directory is that we’re working on now
write-host Working on $dir.fullname using $dir.name

# setup the inheritance and propagation as we want it
$inheritance = [system.security.accesscontrol.InheritanceFlags]“ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit”
$propagation = [system.security.accesscontrol.PropagationFlags]“None”

# get the existing ACLs for the directory
$acl = get-acl $dir.fullname

# add our user (with the same name as the directory) to have modify perms
$aclrule = new-object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule($dir.name, “Modify”, $inheritance, $propagation, “Allow”)

# check if given user is Valid, this will barf if not
$sid = $aclrule.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.securityidentifier])

# add the ACL to the ACL rules
$acl.AddAccessRule($aclrule)

# set the acls
set-acl -aclobject $acl -path $dir.fullname
}


Great Anti-Malware/Adware/Spyware

2008 July 24 – 3:13 pm

During our day to day work we sometimes come across a messy PC full of Malware (or whatever you might want to call it). We recently had to deal just such a poorly PC and a new found tool came to the resuce – Anti-Malware by Malwarebytes.

Exceptionally simple interface, quick download and most importantly dealt with the issue in one simple swoop. During this particular clean up we tried a few usual tried and tested methods which after a reboot served as a waste of time. But this Anti-Malware program sorted it out completed on its first run.

I know what we’ll be using again in the future, easily the best anti-malware / anti-spyware / adware software out there. Thanks for the great software guys.


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