yakk0.org

PowerShell: Add printers to DNS

Jeremy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:55:52 +0000

I realized today that most of our printers at work did not have DNS entries. This isn’t a big problem for users because they’re on our print server and they get their printers through Group Policy. The Print server has each printer set up to the IPs. We just implemented a management system today, and it lists the printers by IP and because the DNS entries were “Unknown” for most of them, it wasn’t easy to determine what printer we were looking at.

I found several PowerShell examples on the web for interacting with Microsoft DNS servers, and took a bit from each to come up with this script. It takes the shared printer name and publishes that as the DNS name. This does cause a problem if you have spaces in a share name, but our environment doesn’t, so I didn’t program for that issue.

Here’s the script:

Function Add-ARecord
{
 Write-Host -ForegroundColor DarkCyan “Importing Printer information”
 # Imports all printers from Print Server
 $printers = (get-WmiObject -class $Class -computername $printSvr)
 $Arecord = [WmiClass]“\\$dnsSvr\root\MicrosoftDNS:MicrosoftDNS_AType” 
 $class = 1 
 $ttl = 3600 # Time-To-Live in seconds
 
 $printers | ForEach-Object{
 Get the name of the Shared Printer
 $name = $_.ShareName 
 # Get IP information from TCP/IP port
 $address = $_.portname.Replace(“IP_”, “”) 
 # output variables for testing

 #write-host -ForegroundColor Yellow $server, $zone, $name, $class, $ttl, $address 

 

 # create DNS A Records

 $Arecord.CreateInstanceFromPropertydata($server, $zone, $name, $class, $ttl, $address) 

 }

}
$Class = “win32_printer” # WMI class for printers

# Change to suit your environment

$printSvr = “printsvr” # Print server

$dnsSvr = “dnssvr” # DNS Server

$zone = “dnszone” # DNS Zone
Add-ARecord

Apple Predictions

Jeremy — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:53:21 +0000

With all the Apple tablet rumors preceding the upcoming Apple event at the end of the month, I thought I’d put down my thoughts about what’s going to be announced. They’re listed in order of most-likely to pipe-dreams.

iPhone updates – The January event has been about new iPhones the last few years, so we’re starting there.

new iPhone models shipping in June with an OLED screen, a better camera, faster processor, more storage, but not much more.
iPhone OS 4.0 with improvements in app management, WiFi syncing with iTunes, customizable lock screen (with things like calendar entries), and speed improvements.
AT&T tethering plans announced

Tablet – While I’m still not 100% sure they’re going to release a tablet in January, this is what I’d like to see in one

10” screen
Customized OSX built for touch, but not necessarily based off the iPhone design. Maybe based off AppleTV, either in the whole OS or only for media playing
WiFi media syncing with iTunes
DisplayPort output

AppleTV – The AppleTV is badly in need of a refresh. The OS just got updated a few months ago, but there’s still room for improvement.

AppleTV software integrated with a TV
New version of AppleTV OS with the new interface throughout.
New hardware with faster processor and more ram
Front Row update for Snow Leopard to unify AppleTV and Front Row interfaces

We’ll see how accurate I am. Out of all of these, I’d say the WiFi syncing is the thing that I’m hoping for the most. I hate having to connect to my laptop to sync when I’m in a hurry. I wish it could stay in sync automatically when they iPhone and Mac are on the same wireless network.

The AppleTV stuff is very unlikely to happen, but it would be nice to have better hardware. The main interface that Apple put out with the newest update is really nice as well. I can’t see why they wouldn’t put that in Front Row as well.

blocking IE6

Jeremy — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:02:26 +0000

Let’s get this out of the way first…I think that IE6 is a horrible browser.

Now that that’s done, the sad truth is that many of us have to deal with IE6 on a daily basis. The school district I work for still has one quarter of the computers running Windows 2000. They have been updating the hardware, but for political reasons were unable to update the operating system for a few years. When I started last January they were halfway through a migration to Vista and had skipped XP entirely. However, there is still 1/4 of the district to go so we’re supporting IE6 for another 7 months or so.

Today I was covering the helpdesk phone and a user called in unable to get to the website for another school district in the area. That district was running a Wordpress plugin that completely prevents IE6 from accessing the site. This is what my user saw:

In my opinion, the administrators for a public school district’s website have the obligation to make the site as accessible as possible. The browser preferences of the site admins should not be allowed to prevent access to the site. If it was a decision by the district administration and not the IT administration, it’s even more stupid. It wouldn’t have bothered me if there was still a way for the older browser to access the site, but they completely block it preventing access by people that have no control over their browser version.

Fixing IT problems with a hammer

Jeremy — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:35:40 +0000

In a continuing process of cleaning up horrible decisions by our predecessors, we just moved a website off one of our domain controllers. The website was moving from IIS6 to 7 (or 7.5, whatever comes with Server 2008 R2), and it required some tweaking to start working again. One of the parts that didn’t work was a self-help page where teachers could unlock student accounts. I set up this web server, and created a service account for it that doesn’t have any special rights on the domain. Because the website runs in IIS as this service account, it could query the domain with no problems, but it didn’t have the rights to unlock accounts.

This is obviously where I differ from a coworker…

him: “Just add the service account to Domain Admins”

me: “Why would I want to do that?”

In the end I remembered I can delegate just the permissions needed to unlock our student accounts to that service account and it works fine.

Why use a hammer when you only need a tiny screwdriver?

quick Windows 7 tip

Jeremy — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:16:55 +0000

Found a quick workaround for my complaint that you can’t pin items that are on network shares to the Windows 7 taskbar. All you have to do is create a folder for shortcuts to all the items, create a new toolbar on the taskbar using that folder. It shows up like the old Quicklaunch toolbar, and creates a separate icon on the taskbar when the app is launched, but it kinda solves my problem.

Here’s the steps:

Create a new folder with shortcuts to the applications you can’t pin.
Right click taskbar and unlock it.
Right click the taskbar again, select toolbars, then select “New toolbar.”
Browse to the folder you created, and click “select folder."