automation

My Big Fat Conference Room Conversion Script for Exchange 2007

In Exchange 2007, they have finally done resources correct. Using Powershell, you can define a mailbox specifically as a conference room, laptop, projector or other resource. As a resource it will appear differently in Outlook 2007 and OWA. These resources can be defined to automagically accept meeting requests using specific permissions on these resources. No longer will you need to use the flaky AAA as in Exchange 2003.

The attached script is my very detailed, all-in-one convert a standard/migrated mailbox to a conference room resource in Exchange 2007.

Use PING to notify when server reboots.

Working on servers, you inveriably need to reboot them. One of the primary tools I use to determine if a server has shut down is to PING the server.

PING servername -t

This will PING the server repeatedly until I quit it. When the server goes down, it will return "Request Timed Out" instead of a valid PING response. Here is what it would look like when the server shuts down, then comes back up again.