Geoff @ UVM

After seven years of providing robust file service hosted on a NetApp filer, we’ve decided to migrate our services to native Windows File Services. We have encountered several issues with the interaction of newer Windows client operating systems and NetApp’s third-party implementation of CIFS and SMB2.

We did meet with some staff from various units on campus to discuss the current state of file services, especially the current pain points, and outlined our current plans. The main themes that emerged from our discussion were as follows:

1. Make the service simpler
   1. H: drive is just confusing; merge it with My Documents
   2. The duplicated folders within user profile directory (e.g. c:\users\netid) create lots of confusion. Any way to address this?
2. Provide more options (increments) for home directory quotas
3. Provide notification to departments regarding storage usage and quotas

We are currently prototyping a new design for our Campus File Services — dare I call it CFSv2 — hosted in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster. It’s still early in the process, but the design look promising.

It’s one of the first questions that we ask clients when we’re helping diagnose a problem with a network resource. There are several different ways to determine your IP address. There’s even a website, whatsmyip.org which will show you what Internet servers think your IP address is.

In this post, I describe how to determine your IP address(es) on Windows 7 using the control panel. You can also use the ipconfig command-line tool, but if you know about that tool, you probably don’t need me to tell you about it.

Network and Sharing Center

One of my favorite aspects of Windows 7 is the search feature in the start menu. As you type a search term, Windows will show you matching programs and documents.

As a case in point, you can type Network in the Start Menu search box, and click the Network and Sharing Center control panel item in the search result.

Alternatively, you can open Control Panel, then Network and Internet, and then click the Network and Sharing Center item.

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Update: better yet, read about the -Join and -Split PowerShell operators. Live and learn.
—Geoff

Something I’ve found myself missing in PowerShell is a function to combing the elements of a list with a given separator, like Perl’s join() function. I finally got annoyed enought to write one. It seems to do what I want, so I’m going to add it to my profile.

Here it is in action:

PS C:\> $array = 3.14,'Puppy',$false,'','Green',$null,'foo'
PS C:\> $array | Join-String
3.14,Puppy,False,,Green,,foo
PS C:\> $array | Join-String -collapse
3.14,Puppy,Green,foo
PS C:\> $array | Join-String -collapse ' - '
3.14 - Puppy - Green - foo

Here’s the code:

# Join-String - A simple pipeline-oriented function to
# concatenate a bunch of strings together with a separator
# Geoffrey.Duke@uvm.edu  Wed 11/17/2010 

function Join-String
(   [string] $separator = ',',
    [switch] $Collapse )
{ 

begin {
    [string] $string = '';
    $first  =  $true;
}

process {
    foreach ( $element in $_ ) {
        #Skip blank elements if -Collapse is specified
        if ( $Collapse -and ($element -eq '' -or $element -eq $null ) ) {
            continue
        }

        if ($first) {
            $string = $_
            $first  = $false
        }
        else {
            $string += $separator + $element -as [string]
        }
    }
}

end {
    $string
}

}

If you have a notion for how it could be improved, please comment.