Just passed my course on Coursera. :o)

Cybersecurity and Its Ten Domains by University System of Georgia on Coursera. Certificate earned on May 18, 2015

CSTD


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I hope you all have at least heard of Spiceworks, a free, simple yet powerful multi-user web application that allows you to inventory, monitor, report on and troubleshoot your network, run a help desk, and access a community of IT pros – all from one easy-to-use interface.

However to me, Spiceworks is more than that. Along with the Spiceworks ‘products’ you also get access to the community, a home, a safe haven, a trading post for knowledge, skills and experience, a sometimes a lot of silliness… :o)

At over 6 million IT pros strong, The Spiceworks Community’s a place where IT pros trade tech tips, show off their awesome projects, share real-world advice from the IT trenches… and have a laugh.

Being around in the Spiceworks community for years, I only recently decided to actively participate in discussions, helping answering questions and testing applications.

I helped to Beta test the Spiceworks Network Monitoring Software and the new (and at this time still work in progress?!) iOS Spiceworks App for iPhone, iPad, and iPad Touch, found bugs and helped to improve things.

If you work in IT, check out my profile and or join us, I promise, you wont regret it! RAWWWR!

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There is no default GPO to set the Desktop background. We have a terminal server with a white wallpaper, however the default background is black, thus you can not read the icon’s font. To fix that, you can create an ADM template.

CLASS USER
CATEGORY !!categoryname
KEYNAME "Control Panel\Colors"
POLICY !!policyname
EXPLAIN !!explaintext
PART !!labeltext DROPDOWNLIST REQUIRED
VALUENAME "Background"
ITEMLIST
NAME "Black" VALUE "0 0 0"
END ITEMLIST
END PART
END POLICY
END CATEGORY
[strings]
categoryname="Background Color Options"
policyname="Change the background color of the client computer"
explaintext="This policy sets the background color of the client computer"
labeltext="Choose a color"

Save that file to your server and name it ‘backgroundcolor.adm’. Open up Group Policy Management and create a new  GPO and link it to the right OU.

Edit the GPO, go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates, right click Administrative Templates and then Add Template

Browse to the Backgroundcolor.adm and add it in. Under Administrative Templates you will now see a custom category called “Set Background Color”

To change the colour of the desktop, select “Desktop Background Color policy”, then enable it.

Simply then enter the RGB value of the color you want.



Here’s a quick break down:

dsquery computer –inactive 8 –limit 1000

This line searches the AD for computers that have not logged in for 8 weeks or more. By default the dsquery will only look for 100 objects so we need to raise the limit.

$comp -replace ‘”‘, ”

Here we are cutting the “ character that dsquery hands the objects names over with. These are located at the start and end.

Disable-ADObject and Move-ADObject are self explanatory.

Note they do have –whatif switches that will help if you want to see whats going to happen.

Append -whatif to the end of the command.

$ADComputers = (dsquery computer -inactive 8 -limit 1000) -WhatIf
foreach ($comp in $ADComputers)
    {
        $compclean=($comp -replace ‘”‘, ”)
        Disable-ADAccount $compclean 
        Move-ADObject $compclean -Targetpath “ou=computers,ou=garbage,dc=domain,dc=com”      
    }