Powershell: Format-table -Autosize, must remember

I am typing this one out so I remember the -Autosize switch when using Powershell.  Dealing with data in Powershell is practically hopeless without it.  Example:

Sorry the AD tree is so large it can't show the users name, but the black space after the name feild is just offending.

How to fix this?

Powershell is an object based language, and most objects are going to have a lot of data, so when that data gets pushed to a terminal sometimes things don't look so pretty, and in the example above, completely worthless.  Thankfully the Powershell dev's had the same opinion and made the Format-Table command-let in order to help with displaying data on the console.  In this example, just add the Format-Table -Autosize switch to auto width the columns to show the entire string.  For short use ft for Format-Table, and pipe your commandlet to it:

| ft -Autosize

Usable data!

Windows 7/8/8.1: Shared Folders Showing as Disconnected, Why?

One day I noticed my network shares showing as disconnected and I chalked it up to quirks in the version of Windows 8.1 I am using.  I can browse the network shares just fine, so nothing was broken, but after awhile it started to bother me.  After searching around I found there can be many causes, some dating back it issues with Windows NT.  It wasn't until I tried the net use command that I realized something was wrong with my system:

This was actually the smoking gun that helped me realize the issue WAS client side and gave me a few places to look.  In this particular case it was the network provider order.  Under Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections press ALT and go to advanced then advanced settings, then Provider Order tab.  Here an NFS client driver was taken precedence over the windows network:

I simply moved NFS down to below Microsoft Windows Network and the network shares instantly no longer showed as disconnected, no need to reboot.

Ghostery: Plugin for Chrome to see who is tracking you.

Ghostery for Chrome provides a way for you to see who and what is tracking you during your web browsing.  I installed this as a curiosity and found the results interesting.

I thought that I would see e-commerce sites do some heavy tracking, see what what products I look at and what I buy so they can build metrics and offer better items to help close the sale.

I do a LOT of reading on tech news sites and their tracking is pretty heavy as far as analytics and advertisement, fair enough, they have large costs for content writers and hosting.

How about blogs?  Some blog writers don't monetized, some do monetize a little, some writers make a career out of blogging, and some only use the platforms default page view tracking.  I looked at a bunch of the IT blogs I follow and mostly found the trackers to be less than 5.

However, I was rather surprised about the amount of tracking that is being done on some forums that I frequent, as much as 20 instances on some sites.  I suppose forums would have a niche group of readers so it is more difficult to advertise to them to help recoup costs.

iDRAC7 Express Remote Access with the Dedicated Nic, Not Possible

With the series of iDRAC7 (Dell remote access cards), the card + nic is built into the motherboard of PowerEdge generation 12 systems.  Instead of having different cards, they have multiple license options, the basic being the iDRAC Express license, with the ‘top’ tier being the Enterprise license.  The Express does NOT allow you to use the iDRAC dedicated nic for remote access:

"NIC Selection: Dedicated: A required license is missing or expired."

You have to use/”share” a motherboard LAN nic (LOM its called) for remote access.  This isn't terrible, but it can cause issues if you plan to team nics, or you may have your nics already allocated out and don't want to share iDRAC traffic with your normal traffic for performance or security reasons.  The Enterprise license allows you to use the iDRAC dedicated port.  Just like iDRAC6, Enterprise also allows access to the virtual terminal/screen, that reason alone may be worth the cost of Enterprise.  To get a 30 day trial of iDRAC7 Enterprise visit this page at the Dell website.
Source:

• [PDF] http://en.community.dell.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-components-postattachments/00-20-06-78-92/iDRAC7_5F00_Licensing_5F00_White_5F00_Paper_5F00_incl_5F00_ValueLine.pdf