automation

Poor man’s enterprise remote support solution

Standard

There are tons of  remote support tools for AD environments, but most of them are commercial, and some of them are user initiated (like Lync 2010+ desktop sharing feature), today we will implement an agentless (sort of), free and pretty effective solution, the end result is a box that you enter the destined Username in (the person you’re trying to help), et voila, you have control over his screen ! (gentlemen, after his permission, of course)

Chapter I :

The base application that we will use is “Windows Remote Assistance” which ships for free with most Windows 7 flavors, the rest is scripting gimmicks.

Out of the box, Windows remote assistance will work if the requester sent an invitation file to the helper, but in our case, we want to initiate the process by offering our help before we even hear the nagging.

To do so, we need to create and link a GPO to our computers OU that enables just that :

Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Remote Assistance

Enable the “Offer Remote Assistance” option and select who can offer remote support, typically you will add your Help Desk group

Enabling WRS in a GPO

After you gpupdate the end-user’s machine, try it:

Open “Windows Remote Assistance” from your helper workstation, then click on Continue reading

Automating Lync 2010 Users Management

Standard

Managing Lync 2010 users is a boring-slash-routine job, especially when you have integrated several VoIP solutions and you want to maintain consistency, for example maybe you use a single extension for the same user across multiple platforms.

In my case, users extensions in Lync is the same as their CUCM’s but prefixed with “5”, Continue reading

Creating new Wireless Guest with PowerShell

Standard

Wireless access in the enterprise can be a huge PITA ! Because you have to find the correct balance between usability and security, you don’t want everyone contacting the help desk asking on how to connect, and based on your hardware, it can be tricky.

In my case, we are using Trapeze wireless controllers (Trapeze recently acquired by Juniper), it has all the functions we need to create a robust wireless access scheme.

I decided to go with 3 SSID’s: Continue reading