From time to time, I do have a life outside of System Center.  I”d like to take a little time to discuss OneDrive. I always thought of cloud storage as a backup drive.  I have a document stored locally, then also in the cloud.  Great! Now no matter what happens to my PC, I have that document.  When I got my Office 365 account, my OneDrive account got a big bump, to 1 TB.  It will soon be unlimited, but for me, having under 1 TB of data, it is more or less unlimited already.  That got me thinking, if I can keep EVERYTHING in the cloud, do I need to keep it locally?

BINGO!  The light went off in my head.  OneDrive has essentially replaced external hard drives.  Sure you will need a hard drive for Program files and system files, but why can’t everything else be in the cloud?  I currently have everything backing up to an external hard drive now.  Why not drop everything in OneDrive?  My movies I have in digital format may be sketchy with internet speed changes, but I can simply say key those local, or even just the ones I feel like watching sometime soon.  I have quite a lot of music that I probably won’t listen to much.  Why no save the local space and put it in the cloud.  It is still only a click and a quick download away.  The big downside to why I haven’t done this already is you need to put everything into OneDrive folders.  You can’t simply sync existing folders. Though, I hear this is going to change soon. The cloud is here, and it’s finally going to be an affordable and better alternative to external hard drives. The light bulb in my head went off a few weeks ago, and many of you will finally see the light soon enough if you have already.  Microsoft’s Cloud First, Mobile First is starting to make a believer out of me.

This isn’t one of my most used reports, nor one I enjoy running, but it does save us a lot of time.  Frequently we will get someone downloading something or spreading a virus that isn’t picked up by Endpoint Protection.  I am usually given an IP address or MAC address and asked who’s PC it is.  That is pretty much the entire reason for this report to exist.  I thought I would share it with everyone.  It’s a very simple report, but is really nice to have when you are frantically trying to find something on the network.

SELECT SYS.Netbios_Name0,NW.IPaddress0,NW.MACAddress0
FROM v_R_System SYS
JOIN  v_Network_DATA_Serialized NW on SYS.ResourceID = NW.ResourceID

WHERE NW.IPaddress0 NOT LIKE ‘%fe%’ AND NW.IPaddress0 NOT LIKE ‘0.0.0.0’