Dave Long

3D Printing

Better Print Process for First Layer Squish

When calibrating my Z-offset on a 3D printer, I use Ellis' Print Tuning Guide's method which lays 9 squares out on the print bed to ensure uniform squish while minimizing filament usage. This works great, but the stock slicer settings order the printing of the squares in

Sudo in Windows with gsudo

One of the things I have always been frustrated is the lack of a sudo command in PowerShell or CMD on Windows. Simply, sudo is a *nix command the elevates the command you're running to run with administrative privileges. On Windows, if you want to do that, the

smarthome

Turning on my office lights when I unlock my computer

I love messing with smart home tech and in my home office, I've had my lights connected to my Home Assistant setup for years. When I walk in, I either hit the light switch which triggers the overhead lights and a few other lights to toggle or I

Controlling case in PowerShell JSON serialization

This method only works for PowerShell classes and not for Hashtables, or PSCustomObject objects Ever wanted to take a PowerShell object that uses the PascalCase property names that PowerShell typically uses, and convert it to JSON using snake case or camel case? Quick Review of Cases In programming there'

hudu

Automating Hudu Magic Dash

The Hudu Magic Dash is, in my opinion, one of Hudu's best and most difficult to use features. Magic Dash enables some awesome ways to highlight certain data and build your own dashboards within Hudu, but it requires the API to use it. As a way to highlight

networking

Prioritizing Windows Network Connections

Windows automatically prioritizes network connections that have multiple routes available based on the the interface speed, for example if you are connected to the same network through WiFi and hard-wire. It may, at times, be necessary to prioritize network traffic out a different interface, for example if you are testing

Atera

Getting all Atera agents reporting a specific alert

So due to a recent Atera bug, it seems like a lot of my servers are alerting availability issues, but every time I try to figure it out, the servers are running totally fine. According to Atera the issue appears to be caused by a bad update to the agent

Atera

Encoding binary files to include in scripts

A common question when building scripts in an RMM like Atera is, "how do I get files that my script needs to the endpoint?" For the most part, I've stored the binary files I need on an Azure file store, Dropbox folder, etc. Any plain text

Connecting to Active Directory and other services from PC

As an MSP, I regularly need to connect to services running on client servers. I often will just connect to a server or management PC setup on the client environment, but it's also really easy to use the RSAT tools on my laptop with a simple command. You

unifi

Setting up Netflow on UniFi Security Gateway

In my last post, I showed how to use the config.gateway.json file to setup a conditional forwarder in a UniFi Security Gateway. Since the UniFi Security Gateway runs the EdgeOS firmware underneath, you can set just about anything that you would be able to configure on an EdgeRouter

DNS Conditional Forwarding on UniFi Security Gateway

Now for something really controversial to start this off: I really like the ease of GUI based management tools for network devices, like UniFi. That said I also really like CLI configuration tools which let me tap into a lot more functionality than the GUI.  If you've ever

Power Automate

Custom Issue Collectors with MS Forms, Power Automate, and Atera

The Atera support portal is handy, but sometimes it can be hard to get people to fill in everything for issues the first time. I also have run into a few clients that want to approve any issues before they hit our support team at Cage Data. While working with

My journey through mental health

This morning I find myself putting away dishes while the kids were in the backyard playing after breakfast. I started putting the tupperware away in the narrow cabinet next to the sink, as I usually do, getting frustrated that it's a tight fit to get them all in.

powershell

Using your partner account to connect to client Exchange Online tenants

This is going to be a really quick one, because I'm mostly posting this so that the next time I google it, I get my own blog instead of some StackOverflow posts and what not. With the Exchange Online PowerShell V2 Module, you can use your Partner Delegation

powershell

Scripting Office with PowerShell: Finding and Replacing Text in Word Documents

In my last post, I introduced you to to the Office Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) objects and how to use them in PowerShell to automate creating an Outlook rule. In this post, let's take a look at how we can perform another task that can be pretty

powershell

Scripting Office with PowerShell: Creating Outlook Rules

One of the really cool things about Microsoft Office is how extensible it is. Microsoft has included scriptable interfaces for all of the Office applications in the form of Component Object Model Objects, or as you may have heard it called: COM objects. The Office COM objects make it possible

Verifying Windows Licenses

While working on a recent project where I was taking over a new business that was detaching from it's parent company, I had to remove KMS licensing from a number of workstations.

networking

Beyond the Basics of nslookup

nslookup is right up there with ping in terms of the most common tools for diagnosing network issues on Windows. Want to know if your DNS is set right for your website? Easy, just type nslookup davejlong.com and you'll see that the hostname points at 68.183.

networking

Testing Local Network Performance with iPerf

In my last iPerf post, I showed how you can use iPerf to test internet speed using a server that I host in Azure. This is really handy when you want to get a good starting point to diagnose network issues for things like staff working from home. What about

powershell

Testing Network Bandwidth with PowerShell and iPerf

One of the first steps to diagnose network issues, especially nowadays when so many people are working from home, is to run a speed test. Testing speed by going visiting one of the many speed tests sites is useful, but what if you want to automate the process of testing

powershell

Monitoring Failover Cluster Patching

Windows Failover Clustering is a great way to run services like DHCP, Hyper-V, etc. resiliently. Microsoft makes it easy to schedule patching using Cluster Aware Updating. Once you have Cluster Aware Updating setup, you'll need to monitor it. First let's get the results of the last

powershell

Default switch values

While working on some updates to the PSAtera module, I came across an interesting situation that didn't seem to have a straightforward answer. The new updates to the Get-AteraTickets command add a number of switch options for narrowing tickets down to only tickets with certain status', so

powershell

GPOs in PowerShell

As more and more companies are taking the serverless route to running their business, GPOs are becoming a thing of the past. While Intune can do a lot to replace GPOs, your company may not be moving to Azure AD with Intune. It might be necessary to just have a

Atera

Mapping Networks with PowerShell

Part of maintaining clients is keeping track of the various networks involved in managing that client. It's important to know where computers are on the network to be able to support them. So here's a quick script, using PSAtera and PSWriteHTML to create a diagram mapping

powershell

Atera's PowerShell for Automation - Part 3

This post was written as part of a series for Atera, the PSA and RMM product we use at Cage Data. In the first and second posts in this series, we looked at how to get started with PowerShell, and how to access the strength of the community by accessing