(no subject)

Systems admin question if I may:


I'm trying to export a list of all the distribution groups in my company's domain into an Excel spreadsheet. The Active Directory Users and Computers plugin that comes with the Microsoft adminpak doesn't let you export directly to Excel, and it's all I've ever used.

I downloaded something called Powershell, along with a GUI called PowerGUI since I don't speak Powershell's command-line language. It seems like it would be great if it all worked, but I can't get it to work the way I want it to. When sorting by group type, I can't distinguish distribution groups from security groups. Plus, it stops at 1000 items in the same folder and I can't find a way to increase the limit. Plus, no matter how I set the filtering options, nothing filters out. Maybe because Powershell wasn't originally intended to manage active directory (it's for Exchange 2007 and I installed a plugin to manage AD) it doesn't quite work right?

Anyway, can anyone who reads my journal tell someone, like me, who's fairly new to this sort of thing, the best way to learn how to do this sorting and exporting quickly? Is there a tool out there? Do I have to learn a scripting language?

Thanks!

(no subject)

I think, not having looked at them yet, that I have some fantastic pictures of the real guts of my favorite theatre. One of the guys who's working on rehabbing the HVAC system there took netrage and I through some of the very few places within that I'd not yet seen. I continue to become more and more fascinated with large scale architecture in general and with theaters specifically as I learn more about them; I had no idea that these chambers even existed! And there are still more places to see!

We crawled through eighty years worth of dust inside the narrow plenum chambers under the seats where the surveyors marks can still be seen on the exposed foundations. We climbed through the huge ductwork in the machine room, and the hot, dirt-floored crawl space under the grand hall where we found contractors notes scribbled on old movie posters and a saw horse that was probably older than any two of us put together. I'll have pictures to share soon, I hope. In the meantime, I'm going to wait for my head to heal (I knocked it pretty well against a concrete support beam) and take a quick look through them. Hopefully, if I give it a little bit to heal, it won't sting quite so badly in the shower that I need to take so I no longer look like a coal miner.