Ever had the need to remove all but the last X amount of copies of a back-up? And I’m not talking about the copies from the last 2 days, because this can cause issues if the files aren’t created daily [in case of a weekend], in case a back-up has failed in the meantime or if multiple back-up copies have been made in one day. While at first I was always playing around with the simple solution by checking file age, I ran into a more elegant solution I’d like to share with you.

In one of my previous blog posts, I had a CSV worth of content in which I wanted to change a specific field of data. I was racking my brain on how I could best approach this and while working on this, I kept getting a better and cleaner result, but every step approached the issue a bit different, even though the output was as required. RequirementsI have a CSV file which contains the following headers

As mentioned previously in my first part of this Get-Date series, I had run into some issues that were seemingly easy to resolve, yet proved to be a bit more hassle than expected. Funny enough, the second issue where I ran into date issues was just a day or so apart from the first, so I thought I’d resolve my issues with the knowledge I had obtained previously. The ProblemI had received an Excel sheet which contained various information, one column being Warranty dates.

The ProblemI had a customer who was complaining that the simple overview of disks used by VM’s didn’t add up to the amount of data in use on datastores. Simple reasoning being swap files, snapshots etc. etc. , but the customer wanted to see exactly what was causing this… In comes PowerCLI [VMWare’s adaption of PowerShell for their solutions] The ScriptEdit: As I had thought at first instance, the datacenter name was working just fine on my 2 test environments, but in a 3rd I quickly ran into an error.

Simple issues, simple solutions?Recently I’ve been doing quite some break-fix cases, which didn’t quite make blogging a high priority. It did on occasion provide me with nice little gems that I decided to spend a little personal time on, because I thought it would be better to force myself to use PowerShell instead of resolving things manually or through a GUI. Also, I thought these issues would be “simple, quick solutions”, which turned out to be a bit too optimistic.

One of my customers was running into an odd case of disappearing e-mails. They have an on-premise Exchange 2010 mail server on which they have a Shared mailbox to which all employees have access. Now all of a sudden mails that are moved/copied TO this shared mailbox mysteriously disappear… First thing that came to mind: Rules! Bring in the ShellFirst of all I needed to check if there weren’t any Server side rules which were configured, which you can easily do with the following command: