MCSE Studying - Week 29

Overview
Week 29 of my studies was quite a routine week of live, online classroom learning as I continued the 70-412 and 70-414 classes through KnowledgeNet. I also took a little time to start doing a detailed map of all of the 70-410 exam requirements so that I can start seeing where I need to focus my attention.

Cool Stuff
The coolest thing from week 29 was the chance to further cement my knowledge of DNS security. DNS security is accomplished through a variety of means, including randomizing the DNS socket pool, DNS cache locking, and DNSSEC, to name but a few. DNS is definitely one of the critical services that all sysadmins need to know if they want to secure their career.

PowerShell cmdlet of the Week
I once again failed to come up with a cmdlet to cover this week, so I turned to my peers and took suggestions as to which cmdlet I should cover this week. I know they are relatively simple ones, but I use one of them quite regularly. They are:

Restart-Computer
Stop-Computer

Restart-Computer is one of those cmdlets that I use all the time, usually to reboot a server after using Add-Computer to join it to the domain. The other place I used it was in a script that, among other things, performed a maintenance reboot on a group of computers that were used to display flight schedule information in common areas. The line in the script was:

Restart-Computer -ComputerName DisplayPC01,DisplayPC02,DisplayPC03 -Force -Wait

This had the advantage of forcing an immediate restart of the remote computers, and, at least in the ISE, displayed a status bar showing how many of the computers had successfully restarted. This last part, using the -Wait switch, meant that I would not be returned to the PowerShell prompt until after the computers had rebooted. This saved me the hassle of walking around the building to check and see if they had rebooted.

The second cmdlet, Stop-Computer has similar usage, but instead of rebooting the machine, it will shut it down.

I may actually create a small script to shut down the various training and testing environments in my lab. This would be a time saver, as in the past I have had to shut down as many as 12 servers in order to switch to a different training environment, say, between 70-411 and PowerShell. The script might look something like this:

Stop-Computer -ComputerName PS-Member01,PS-FileServer01,localhost -Force

I'll let you know how that works out.

Stats
Total time studying: 13 hrs.

• 70-410: 1 hr.
• 70-412: 6 hrs.
• 70-414: 6 hrs.

Resources used:

KnowledgeNet Live Learning Course: Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 R2 Services

KnowledgeNet Live Learning Course: Implementing an Advanced Server 2012 R2 Infrastructure

In Closing
The hours spent studying this week were a little lower than I would like. I will need to refocus on carving out the time to study and get back into the books. While I am enjoying having time to study, I am starting to miss having real world challenges to work on. Soon enough, soon enough.

Have a great week everyone!