The actual serial number of a Barracuda NG Firewall can be obtained remotely in two ways:
A very useful guide on how to download specific files (such as older versions of games) on Steam:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/611h5e/guide_how_to_download_older_versions_of_a_game_on/
DellEMC offers a free-to-try virtual appliance of DataDomain, allowing you to do a Try & Buy. You can download the appliance here:
https://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/data-domain-virtual-edition.htm
A very useful blog article about killing active sessions to a compromised Office 365 account:
Starting from Windows 10 Creators Fall Update, you can use VT escape sequences to colorize the output to console. You can use this to colorize columns in Format-Table, too.
A sample snippet, colorizing the output based on the contents of the "Status" field:
read more$somelist | FT FirstName,LastName,@{l="Status";e={
switch ($_.Status) {
"OK" {$color = 92; break}
"NOT OK" {$color = 91; break}
default {$color = 93}
}
"$e[${color}m$($_.Status)${e}[0m"
}}
A complete list of color codes can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/console/console-virtual-terminal-sequences
HP 1920 switches (and others of the same kind) have a CLI mode which is highly restricted. It is possible to unlock this, providing full access to the configuration of the switch through CLI.
Log on to the CLI (SSH or Telnet) with the admin user and the password (default: none).
Type and press Enter:
_cmdline-mode on All commands can be displayed and executed. Continue? [Y/N]
Press Y to confirm.
Please input password:
Enter the password. This is a firmware-set password and is not user-defined. Depending on the firmware, try one of these:
If successful, you can now run all commands.
You can use either esxcli or vicfg-hostops to enter/exit maintenance mode.
esxcli
vicfg-hostops
Note that you can use vicfg-hostops --operation info to check whether the host is finished with entering maintenance mode or is still busy.
PowerCLI
After connecting to the host or vCenter server:
You can easily test the availability of an NTP server by using ntpdate. This utility is a command line utility which performs a one-time time sync to the specified NTP server but it can also be used to query the time without setting it by using the -q parameter:
$ ntpdate -q 10.30.0.1 server 10.30.0.1, stratum 4, offset 0.001217, delay 0.04170 8 Jan 10:19:36 ntpdate[2376]: adjust time server 10.30.0.1 offset 0.001217 sec
For those looking for the default PIN for the bluetooth connection of a HP OfficeJet H470, it's 0 0 0 0.
Although it can be found in the manual somewhere, it's easily overlooked.
Sometimes, you need to temporarily start a service (such as SSH) to perform some maintenance task. PowerCLI can help you with this:
To start the SSH server on each host of a vCenter:
Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | ? {$_.Key -eq "TSM-SSH"} | Start-VMHostService
To stop the SSH server:
Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostService | ? {$_.Key -eq "TSM-SSH"} | Stop-VMHostService -Confirm:$false
As always, you can make adjustments to the oneliner to select another service to start/stop, or further limit the selection of hosts to a cluster or a group of hosts (e.g. filtered by name).
