Kamil Pro

Sysadmin’s tools – what I have installed on my laptop

We need tools to make our work. Either it’s notepad and paper, a hammer (for server’s hard reset… just joking) or some sophisticated and bespoke peace of hardware – we as professionals need tools to make our work better, or even possible. Since working as IT person, there are many software tools I need to do my day to day tasks, thus here’s the list of pieces of software I’ve been finding useful....

2018 summary

Here we are, again. Same symbolic time of the year. I find it perfect to review the past 12 months and have a think about it. I broke it down into three sections – professional, personal and what didn’t work out. So, let’s go! Professional Learnt PowerShell – I think it was the biggest achievement career wise this year. It’s hard to put this in formalised matter, or any sort of figure – but the change of my mindset is the biggest one....

Backup Exec – cataloging multiple tapes with a single tape drive

Recently I’ve had a request to restore a certain backup from the old backup tapes. We’ve had a new Backup exec installation which didn’t have the catalogue/record of these tapes nor the actual tape drive to recover them – I knew it was going to be one in the world task. And the hell it was. Locating tapes in the storage unit was a pure joy – no need to go to the gym after this....

Use Windows Server as iSCSI target with ESXi

The task: to move a virtual machine from one ESXi to another. The ESXis are on two completely separate networks. VM size is 5.5 TB, with one file being 5TB. The problem: VM cannot be started due to maxed out resources. There’s no NAS or any other means of storage where the files could be transferred to. From previous experience, I knew that transfer over SSH or USB would be well too slow, as the task was time critical....

Resolve IP and DNS with Powershell tool

I’ve been asked to prepare a simple tool which would: Resolve IP address or DNS Return all results to table Import addresses from a file The reason behind was to check how IP/DNS records change over the period of time, therefore there was a need for something like that: A file with all addresses in question Tool which could import all these addresses and resolve them Save the results into a new file Once having at least a couple of files, the results could be compared....