How-To Geek

Have you ever needed to know what a remote device thinks the value of a metric is? HTG explains what the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is and how can you use it to monitor network devices.

Geeks have had their own “money” for some time, but typically it is within the context of online gaming. While this digital currency does possess intrinsic value, the market for it is usually limited to other gamers. However, 2009 gave rise to another form of digital currency, bitcoin, which has demonstrated some global demand as a medium for exchange.

Have you ever had the need to bulk restore your Citrix-Xen VMs for a disaster recovery (DR) solution, or just to test that your backups are working? HTG explains how to use Xen-Phoenix, a free bash script, for VM restoring.

Have you ever wished your Hypervisor could be installed at the push of a button, without the tedious searching for the install CD and answering the same boring installation questions? HTG explains how to PXE an automated installation of Citrix-Xen.

Have you ever wished you could get the “Windows Recovery Console” running for that one maintenance procedure or program you want to use, without having to remember where you’ve forgotten the CD? HTG explains how to boot WinPE from PXE.

This guide explains how to configure a Windows Server 2008 machine to push out a static Ubuntu image that can be picked up by diskless terminals, so that you can have any number of machines running a fully-functional instance of Ubuntu without having a hard drive, as long as they are capable of PXE booting.

Snapshots are a massive time saver when you are testing settings and configuration for your Geek School testing. Read on to see how you can take advantage of them while following along with our articles.

Our Geek School articles can get pretty complicated, and there’s no reason to do a ton of crazy stuff on your own desktop PC. Instead, you can just VirtualBox like we do to create virtual machines for all of your testing. Here’s how to do it.

Sure, anybody can end a process from the Task Manager, but did you know you can also do it from the command line?

A few weeks ago, The Geek showed you how you can use the command prompt to find when your computer was started up last. In this last installation of Geek School for PowerShell, we are going to write a reusable PowerShell command to do the same thing.

As we move away from simply running commands and move into writing full blown scripts, you will need a temporary place to store data. This is where variables come in.

PowerShell offers two ways for you to extend the shell. You can either use snapins, which are binary only and developed in a fully-fledged programming language like C#, or you can use modules, which can be binary as well as script based.

PowerShell has four types of jobs – Background Jobs, Remote Jobs,WMI Jobs and Scheduled Jobs. Join us as we find out what they are and how we can use them.

Since PowerShell is based on the .Net Framework and incorporates various other technologies like WMI and CIM, there is always more than one way to accomplish the same thing. Come join us for this short post where we learn how to choose the best method to accomplish our tasks.

WMI and its newer brother CIM can both be used to manage the Windows machines in your environment. But do you know the difference between them? Join us as we take a look.

One of the best features PowerShell offers is the ability to remotely manage your Servers. It even lets you manage a bunch of them at once as well.

In this edition of Geek School, we look at formatting, filtering and comparing objects in the Pipeline.

Understanding objects is one of the fundamental concepts to “getting” PowerShell. Join us as we explore objects and how they make PowerShell better than any other shell out there today.

If you have used ipconfig or ping through the command prompt, you’re halfway to becoming a PowerShell ninja. So come on and join us as we discover cmdlets in this installation of Geek School.

In this edition of Geek School, we will be helping you understand the powerful PowerShell scripting language that is built right into Windows, and is extremely useful to know in an IT environment.

In this installation of Geek School we take a look at our options for Backup and Recovery. This is an important one, so come on and join us.

In this installation of Geek School, we take a look at Folder Virtualization, SIDs and Permission, as well as the Encrypting File System.

In today’s edition of Geek School, we look at the tools we can use to monitor the performance and reliability of our computers.

If you followed our guide to encrypting your removable disks with Bit Locker, you will recall that we saved our recovery key to the cloud, which is a new feature in Windows 8. The first thing we need to do is go and retrieve that key, which can be done by heading over to this URL. At this point you will need to sign into your Microsoft account, the same one you signed into Windows 8 with.

Have you ever faced the problem where you only want to have one DHCP server on the network for central management of your scopes, but you have multiple Vlans? HTG explains how to use a DHCP relay agent.