[Powershell] How to annoy your users to restart their computers more often

A few days ago someone on /r/sysadmin asked how others are making their users restart the computer more often.

Since I wrote a little Powershell script for exactly this purpose back in march I thought I'd share it here.

Java usage tracking or "How to figure out what Java is used for in your environment"

UPDATE 2018-10-17: The release notes of Java 8u191/192 indicate that the location of the usagetracker.properties file has been changed. The guide below has been updated accordingly.

Oracle announced the end of Java 8 and that they will no longer provide free updates for Java 8 for enterprises after January 2019 here and here. And while Mozilla, Google and even Microsoft already removed Java support from their respective flagship browsers Oracle also announced that they will drop the browser plugin completely in upcoming releases.

[Powershell] Installing fonts - the hard way

This post is more of a guide than me finding weird bugs and the documention of my adventures trying to figure out what is actually going on. But even then I came across something new that kind of tripped me up.


A number of departments in the company I work for use various special fonts, which are part of the "Corporate Identity". Whenever a machine in one of those departments gets replaced we needed to install these special fonts on the new machine. And since we have been replacing a couple hundred machines over the last half year and will continue to replace a couple hundred machines every year on a regular basis from now on I decided to take a look at how to automate the deployment of fonts.

As I have mentioned in previous posts we are using Microsoft's SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) for Windows/Office update and general software deployment. So the tool of choice for the task was of course that. All I needed now was a script that could properly install the fonts and hand that script over to the guy in charge of the SCCM server so he could deploy it to the machines in question.

Windows folder redirection not working - The Reckoning

As already written in the "Windows folder redirection not working ... sometimes" article we are making use of the Windows folder redirection group policies to redirect folders like "Documents", "Desktop" and "Favorites" to a server share in order to save space on the local harddisks/SSDs and of course make that data available to the user no matter what workstations he logs onto. For the redirection we use the environment variable %HOMESHARE% which basically contains the value of the AD field "HomeDirectory".

Until now the folder structure we were using for the home directories was a little odd. The home directories resided in "\\server\users\home\<department>\<accountname>" which means that whenever a user changes department his/her entire home directory had to be moved to a new location.

The server department started moving the first departments' users' home directories to a new structure (and updated the "homedirectory" value in the AD for the affected users accordingly). The new locations for the home directories are five DFSs under "\\server\users\home0[1-5]\<accountname>" hosted on a NetApp server. The split into "home01" to "home05" is done so that they do not have to restore a giant 10TB share and instead only have to deal with smaller 2TB portions when things go south.

And even though the people in charge claimed that they tested everything thoroughly things did go south when they migrated the home directories of the first hundred or so users ...

Windows folder redirection not working ... sometimes

We are making use of the Windows folder redirection group policies to redirect folders like "Documents", "Desktop" and "Favorites" to a server share in order to save space on the local harddisks/SSDs and of course make that data available to the user no matter what workstations he logs onto.

Our home directories are a little odd in regards to the folder structure we are using. The home directories reside in "\\server\users\home\<department>\<accountname>" which means that whenever a user changes department his/her entire home directory must be moved to a new location.