Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

From the beginning of time (well mine anyways) one of things I really really enjoyed is making stuff happen by itself. I loved to see helicopters fly or cars roll away under there own power. Fortunately I discovered electronics at an early age and my interest turned to all things electric. Finally I became interested in computers and well that brings me to my current post.

A while back I tinkered with home automation but that was hard to source all these products and I really couldn’t afford them but now that virtualization is here you can have multiple computers all running on the same physical machine. This is a breeding ground for automation. Along comes this product called Kaseya and for me the rest is history.

I recently became involved in the Kaseya project in my company and I absolutely love this product. Most people that work with it say it’s great when it’s working and a real pain when its not and I would have to say that I feel the same way.

Occasionally I come across some ideas from others and can actually turn out some automation of my own that can help manage the computers of my own lab or of my companies managed contracts. Recently we tackled the issue of disk corruption in computers. For anyone in our line of work you might be familiar with running chkdsk on a system volume and how often that is run. It should be done as a normal preventative measure but it requires exclusive use of the drive so it can only be done during the boot cycle. This means that you or your clients are usually without a working computer while it runs it’s course. Something you might think could take minutes can sometimes take hours and once you start it you can’t really stop it.

We used the power of Kaseya scripting to put together a preventative process to test for the need to fix the system drive and can now schedule it during off hours. This script will test the system drive and reboot the server if it finds errors that need to be repaired.

Just one of the many features we employ at Manawa Networks.