Enabling MSMQ in Windows via PowerShell

First, let's start off by seeing which Windows features for MSMQ are available in your installation:

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online | ? { $_.FeatureName -like '*msmq*' }

If you see a message like "Failed to load program with incorrect format", double check that you're running a 64-bit version of PowerShell if your machine is running a 64-bit version of Windows.

Then, let's enable the ones we actually need:

$packageResults = @(Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online | ? { $_.FeatureName -like '*msmq*' -and $_.State -ne 'Enabled' } | Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -All -NoRestart)

$packagesRequiringRestart = @($packageResults | ? { $_.RestartNeeded })

if ($packagesRequiringRestart.Count -gt 0)
{
    Restart-Computer
}

This script takes the packages with MSMQ in the name, enables them along with any requisite parent features and prevents restart during installation. Once complete, we check the results to see if any installations require a restart. If there are any that require a restart, we restart the computer. As with anything else in PowerShell, and IT in general, use judgement and critical thinking.

IMPORTANT: The Get-WindowsOptionalFeature cmdlet and associated module are part of the DISM module. This module is available built-in with Windows Server 2012 and up. In Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008, it's available as part of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit available here. Even though the page says the installer is for Windows 8.1, it works on Windows 7 / Server 2008

Getting the Active Directory cmdlets (for scripted and remote management of your Windows Server machines)

To get the cmdlets, you'll need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools, available here.

Alternatively, you can follow the instructions on this blog: http://www.itgeared.com/articles/1072-how-to-install-rsat-on-windows-server_21/

Getting the SQL Server PowerShell tools

They're apparently not that easy to find. The SQL Server PowerShell Tools come as part of the SQL Server Feature Pack for their respective versions. You can find the SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack (along with the PowerShell Tools) here.

A really quick note about deploying SQL Server .dacpac files to SQL Azure

When you're using SqlPackage.exe to deploy a .dacpac to Azure, you must have access to the 'master' table in order for the tool to retrieve information necessary to create a diff of the database and deploy the differences during the Publish action.

For that reason, you need the 'sa' account, because simply having 'db_owner' on the Azure database is not sufficient.

Changing the password complexity requirements on Windows Server

To change the password complexity requirements on Windows Server (2008 at least) (for whatever reason), do the following :

Start -> Run -> gpedit.msc -> Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Account Policies -> Password Policy

Then in the right-hand policy pane, set 'Password must meet complexity requirements' to 'Disabled' (right-click -> Properties)

Keeping your servers up to date

As I've previously mentioned on this blog, our company uses Ubuntu for our servers. I won't re-iterate the reasons why in this post, you can search this blog using an Ubuntu tag if you're interested in them. Our servers have uptimes of months and months, and as a result, the clocks on the machines tend to drift over time, which has inspired me to start using NTP to keep the clocks synchronized. A quick Google search yielded the desired results. In order to manually synchronize with NTP, you can run the following commands :

sudo /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate

sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Obviously, entering this command every day or every week gets tiresome and stupid, so you can get cron to schedule this daily for you by running the following commands :

echo "sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com" >> /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate
chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate