Month: January 2017

Using PowerShell to Manage Windows Server DNS entries

John Leave a comment

Firstly, Happy new year. Anyway, I was recently tasked with creating a large number of DNS entries on our internal DNS servers. To accomplish this I decided to use PowerShell to perform an import of a CSV file that I had been given that already had my DNS entries. There was a header row with HostName and IPAddress as columns and then dozens of lines entries that needed to become DNS A Records on our server.

So the first command I used to Import these records was the below (replace adatum.com.au with your DNS zone) and DNSentries.csv with your filename.
Import-CSV C:\Scripts\DNSentries.csv | %{ Add-DNSServerResourceRecordA -ZoneName adatum.com.au -Name $_."HostName" -IPv4Address $_."IPAddress" }

After completing that I noticied that some had a typo (the file was given to me) so instead of going in and manually removing the ones that were wrong, I again used PowerShell to remove them with the following command:
Import-CSV C:\Scripts\DNSentries.csv | %{ Remove-DnsServerResourceRecord -ZoneName "adatum.com.au" -RRType "A" -Name $_."HostName" -RecordData $_."IPAddress" }

Using the above commands you can quickly and easily add or remove DNS entries from your Windows Server DNS Infrastructure using entries from a CSV file.

Using custom OWA URLs in SharePoint to display your inbox as well as calendar and other items

John Leave a comment

This one has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while but last year I was experimenting with our SharePoint environment and thought it would be a cool idea to have a view of our web mail and calendar come up into our SharePoint homepage as web parts. Now if you are running SharePoint 2010/2013 you can simply use the Outlook OWA web parts to display what you want to a degree but by using a web page viewer web part and specifying the URL we can have a better degree of control on the output of the page.

So start by adding a web page viewer web part to your page and point the web part to your exchange server hosting Outlook Web Access. The following is an example of a URL that you can use:

Exchange 2010

https://owaurl/owa/?cmd=contents&module=Publicfolders&fpath=School%20Calendar&view=weekly

Exchange 2013

https://owaurl/owa/#path=/calendar

For more information on how to format the links and available flags please follow this link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232199.aspx. I hope that has helped some people in bringing better looking mail access to their share point environments.