Reset the CSC (Offline Files) database

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

Over the years I’ve had many issues where a Windows client PC just won’t connect to a share using the FQDN, but can connect using the NetBios name. There have also been plenty of occasions where the opposite is true, too.

I had the issue again today on a freshly-built Windows 10 machine. Folder redirection wouldn’t apply because the user’s desktop folder was inaccessible.

Then I came across this post on the Spiceworks forums that mentioned resetting the CSC database. I tried that, and folder redirection now works perfectly!

If caching is enabled on the share in question, and the CSC database is knackered, you’ll run into this same problem.

If only I’d known about this earlier in my 15-year IT career, it could potentially have saved a lot of headaches.

Add the following reg key/value. then reboot the PC:

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Csc\Parameters /v FormatDatabase /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Retrieving voicemail files from a Mitel 3300 controller, and converting them to WAV

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

Today I had the displeasure of having to figure out how to retrieve and convert voicemail files from some old Mitel 3300 controllers.

Thanks to this forum post which pointed me in the right direction.

  1. Connect via FTP using a proper FTP client like FileZilla, to the 3300’s IP address
  2. Navigate to /vmail/d/vm/grp/<extension>
  3. Grab the relevant file. They’re all G.711 U-Law format RAW audio files
  4. Grab SoX – https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/, and extract it somewhere
  5. Run the following command:
sox.exe --channels 1 --type raw --rate 8000 -e u-law -v 1 -D <inputfile> outputfile.wav

Quickly uninstall an MSI on multiple computers using WMI

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

Today I was working on reducing our vulnerability attack surface, and needed to remove Adobe Reader from our servers. It appears that it was installed as part of a VM image, but never maintained afterwards.

Long story short, rather than mess around with ConfigMgr baselines or Applications, I decided to go the direct route. To top it off, PowerShell remoting’s currently playing up. I ended up using WMI via the method that I outlined in my previous post.

Given an array of server names in $servers:

$servers | %{Invoke-WmiMethod -Class Win32_Process -Name Create -ArgumentList 'MsiExec.exe /x "{AC76BA86-7AD7-1033-7B44-AA1000000001}" /norestart /qn' -ComputerName $_}

Trigger a remote GPUpdate without PSRemoting or PSExec

/ Daniel S / 1 Comment

I recently enabled Windows Firewall on an unused server via GPO, but forgot to include the inbound RDP exception. This, of course, kicked me off my RDP session.

Rather than wait ~90 minutes for my revised GPO to take effect, I found that I could trigger a GPUpdate remotely using WMI (WinRM wasn’t enabled, and I didn’t want to use PSExec)

The following command does the trick:

Invoke-WmiMethod -Class Win32_Process -Name Create -ArgumentList "gpupdate.exe" -ComputerName <computername>

View the creation date for AD-integrated DNS records

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

6 months in to my new job, and I’ve still got a big mess of old static DNS records to clean up from our Active Directory-integrated DNS.

The DNS management console doesn’t show any sort of date information, but I knew that because the data is stored in AD, there should be some sort of created/modified date on each record.

I had a look using ADSIEdit, and sure enough, there were the dates! Here’s a quick one-liner to pull out the records and their created/modified dates:

Get-ChildItem "AD:DC=contoso.com,CN=MicrosoftDNS,CN=System,DC=contoso,DC=com" | Get-ADObject -Properties Created,Modified | Select-Object Name,Created,Modified | Sort-Object -Property Created

Armed with the creation date of each record, I’m in a better position to determine which ones are no longer needed.

PowerShell: Get all unlinked GPOs

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I decided to spend some of the quiet time now at the beginning of the new year to clean up Group Policy here at my new job. We had roughly the same number of GPOs as staff!

I’d already removed at least 10-20 GPOs manually, but I wanted a quick way to find all of the un-linked GPOs that were still just sitting around.

I found this great post by Mark Schill from back in 2013 that still does the job.

Mark’s solution, however, pulls out only the display name property. I needed to modify his solution a little, as I wanted to pipe the results to the Remove-GPO cmdlet. Here’s what I did:

Get-GPO -All | Where-Object { $_ | Get-GPOReport -ReportType XML | Select-String -NotMatch "<LinksTo>" }

The above one-liner gets all unlinked GPOs, and returns Microsoft.GroupPolicy.Gpo objects.

It goes without saying that you should be very careful when bulk-deleting anything. I first backed up all of my GPOs and dumped the list into text format to review it. I manually checked the settings on a few of the GPOs in question, and only then, deleted them.

Here’s how I generated the list to review:

$unlinkedGPOs = Get-GPO -All | Where-Object { $_ | Get-GPOReport -ReportType XML | Select-String -NotMatch "<LinksTo>" }
$unlinkedGPOs | Sort-Object -Property DisplayName | Select-Object DisplayName,CreationTime,ModificationTime | Format-Table

Correct Horse Battery Staple for PowerShell, AKA Random Memorable Password Generator

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I’m a fan of using correcthorsebatterystaple.net for generating temporary passwords for users, rather than always using a static password. The site itself is a reference to the XKCD webcomic, and yes, I’m aware that there are plenty of opinions on the web about this topic.

password_strength

I’ve had the idea in the back of my mind for a while to see if I could replicate the site’s functionality in PowerShell. I noticed that the source code for the site is on GitHub, so I ducked over there to check out the word list.

I found that it’s possible to replicate most of the functionality of the site with just two lines of PowerShell (although it doesn’t result in very readable code):

  1. I used Invoke-WebRequest to grab the word list from GitHub
  2. I then expanded out the Content property, and split it up given the comma delimiter
  3. I then used a combination of the Range operator, Foreach-Object, [string]::join,Get-Random and the TextInfo class to generate a given number of passwords along these rules:
    1. 4 random words, each with the first letter capitalised
    2. A separator in between
    3. A random number between 1 and 99 at the end

Note that this isn’t failure-proof, and isn’t intended to be used in any complex scenario. There’s no error handling, and not much flexibility built in. It’s just a quick function you could put into your PowerShell profile.

You can, at least, do the following:
A PowerShell window displaying the output of Get-RandomPassword. Also shows the function being called with a Count parameter as well as a separator parameter

Here’s the code: