Pavleck.NET

Unemployment, it has it’s good and bad points.

The good points? In between job interviews and calls from recruiters for jobs I’m not even close to being qualified for (Senior Solaris Architect.. What?) I have more then enough time to work on neat things with OpsMgr. Showing you all the awesome things you can do with it, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.

The bad points? Well, mainly the lack of funds to buy some of the stuff I need to make the cool stuff to show you – but you can help me there!

One of the neat things I’ve been working with OpsMgr is integrating it into the physical world. Creating a connector to read from, and interact with, things outside of the server room. So one of the biggest things you could gift me (Consider it a late 33rd birthday present if you like) is a gift certificate to SparkFun Electronics.

What will I do with that? Well, depending on just how much I get I plan to get the following devices (In order of importance)

• RFID USB Reader and RFID Tags
• Magnetic Card Reader/Writer and blank cards
• Thermocouples (Temperature Sensors)
• Infrared Emitter & Detector
• Proximity Sensors
• Force and various other sensors

And a few other things as well. In total, it’s several hundred dollars worth of parts – but I don’t expect that from anyone, just a little will do.

I’m also always looking for things to expand my network to better bring you a more in-depth OpsMgr experience. So I’m also looking for complete servers¹ as well as peripherals such as external tape drives and hard drives. If you have something to donate, please feel free to email me and let me know. If you’d rather donate with your bank account, I’ve added a donate button below – every donation of at least $5 will also come with a Pavleck.NET lanyard – I have a bunch of them left and would love to get rid of some of them.

Thanks, and now I’m back to the console!

1. Either quad core workstations or ‘real’ servers such as Proliant 380s, fairly modern [↩]

As I add more and more things to this site, Wordpress ceases to be able to properly handle it all – it’s time to move up to a more suitable CMS. So upon the advice of fellow #powershell member Sepeck, I’m moving it all over to a nice and shiny Drupal install.
With a proper CMS, you’ll have a much easier time accessing all of the scripts, downloads, tips & tricks, and contests offered here – and I won’t have to fight with the system so much to get it to do what I want it to do. You’ll also find an awesome time saver; the combined OpsMgr Feed Aggregator – featuring all of the major players in the OpsMgr world on one page.  Like today, it would have been covered with a solid wall of “R2 beta is out!”.

Additionally, there is something that’s in enough of a ready state to show you. It’s in a fairly rough state right now as I steal time to clean things up, but I present to you the Pavleck.NET OpsMgr Wiki. It’s based on the wonderful Deki Wiki software, and I’m quickly falling in love with it. And thanks to some PoSh goodness by Jaykul, you can see the get-help for all of the Command Shell cmdlets. Right now I’m using the free version until I figure out just how active and used it is – the Pro version is only $99 though. Although that’s not the most expensive price in the world, it will take a little time for me to budget – unless you’d like to help. Any donations received go towards the improvement of this site AND awesome prizes to give away to you all! Feel like donating? Awesome! Please click the button below:

Everyone who donates at least $5 will receive a free Pavleck.NET lanyard. They aren’t here yet but they will be. And might I add, they do look quite stunning! Get rid of that company-logo’d cheapie with a high quality Pavleck.NET lanyard. 5/8″ thick, silkscreened logo onto the strong polyester. And it features a break away so you don’t kill yourself, and so you can pop those thumb drives off in 3 seconds. Donations of $10 or above will have a chance to see attached to that Lanyard a 4, 8, 16, or even a ginormous 32GB Corsair Flash Voyager USB drive! So open those eWallets .

This is a lanyard to be proud of!