Month: December 2020

We feel the need to make a full disclosure about the recent news of a hack of Solarwinds since we use the Solarwinds Remote Monitoring and Maintenance platform to manage our monthly clients. Based on a cyber incident write-up by FireEye, an enterprise security research firm, Solarwinds had one of their software packages called Orion compromised by files included in update files. This attack has effected many large organizations including many governmental agencies and larger firms worldwide. The software under attack is used by these larger organizations to monitor the performance of their networks even across multiple locations. This software is completely different from the product that we use and we have been assured by Solarwinds that no compromise of the Remote Monitoring and Maintenance platform has occurred. 

We continue business as usual including allowing users to use this platform for remote access to their business. We continue to add further automation into the system to better monitor and maintain your networks and computers. 

If your company is going to use full disk encryption or has compliance requirements that you need consulting for, then contact us for assistance.

As our business continues to focus on providing white labeled Tier 3 IT support services, RMM as a service, and co-managed IT services this blog will be highlighting tips for RMM automation. Here is a script that we came up with to handle a particular client that has a Line-of-Business application that does automatic backups to the server but it does not clean up after itself which leads to a full server hard drive. We have tailored this script to be used not only at that client but for any folder on any Microsoft Windows computer for any number of days previous and for any specified file extension. This script could easily be modified to take any action on files in a folder older than a specific date, like copy them to off-site storage bucket in Amazon Glacier.

Variables

Here are the variables we are using for this script:

• $DaysAgo = the number of days ago or older that you want deleted
• $FileExtension = the extension for the files that are to be deleted or leave blank for all files
• $FolderPath = the full local file path that is to be cleaned

Script Snippet

# Defines the 'days old' (today's date minus DaysAgo)
$days = -($DaysAgo)
$age = (Get-Date).AddDays($days)

# Get all the files in the folder and subfolders matching extension | foreach file
if ($FileExtension -ne '') {
    Get-ChildItem $FolderPath -Recurse -File | Where-Object { $_.Extension -eq $FileExtension } | foreach{
        # if creationtime is 'le' (less or equal) than DaysAgo days
        if ($_.CreationTime -le $age){
            Write-Output "Older than $DaysAgo days - $($_.name)"
            # remove the item
            Remove-Item $_.fullname -Force -Verbose
            }
        }
    }else {
        Get-ChildItem $FolderPath -Recurse -File | foreach{
            # if creationtime is 'le' (less or equal) than DaysAgo days
            if ($_.CreationTime -le $age){
                Write-Output "Older than $DaysAgo days - $($_.name)"
                # remove the item
                Remove-Item $_.fullname -Force -Verbose
                }
            }
    }

This script is destructive meaning that the files deleted are gone for good, so be careful with this one. Notice that we put in some output that will declare a file older than $DaysAgo and then delete it giving the details of the delete. This give a record of what was deleted. We have thought also about adding a counter for total amount of file space deleted, but making it human readable is not simple code.

If your company is a MSP or wants to become one and automation just seems out of reach, then contact us to run your RMM for you.

When the pandemic ushered in a new reality of social distancing, Mercy Housing was able to continue supporting the residents and communities it serves while keeping everyone safe using Microsoft Teams. This customer story video outlines when COVID-19 created a tremendous need for a tool that can maintain personal connection, Teams has allowed the company to maintain reaching residents and serving its communities, growing the business while working remotely, all while supporting highly secure environments for remote work.