Adding the SharePoint Snap In to PowerShell

What's the first step? If you are using the ISE, and you want to have the scripts excited from any PowerShell environment:
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

This line adds the SharePoint snapin and makes any PowerShell console the same as the SharePoint Management Console.

If you want to get cute you can add the following code to see if the SharePoint snapin is available, and throw a friendly error message if it is not:

$snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object{$_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell'}
if($snapin -eq $null)
{
Write-Output('SharePoint snapin does not exist on this server')
}else{
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
}


As long as you know the namespace of the PowerShell snap in that you want to add, the above code will work to add it simply replace the SharePoint snapin namespace (Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell) with the namespace of your snap in.

Windows Server 2008 R2 High DNS Memory Usage

I was messing around with the Desktop Experience on my Windows Server 2008 R2 server and decided that I wanted to use one of the gadgets that I found useful with Windows 7. The gadget shows all of the core processor usage and the memory usage on the server.
This was a domain controller in my R&D farm, it is also my Hyper-V host so I kind of use it as a workstation as well. Don't judge me...

I installed it and found that my memory usage was abnormally high. Investigating, I opened Task Manager and found that DNS was eating up about 35MB per core. What the??? DNS should be nearly non existent. So I started to do some checking.

I hooked up my handy dandy Colasoft trace tool and found that I got a ton of errors when trying to connect to my ISP's DNS. Something about wrong format, more specifically "Additional Record: of type OPT on class Unknown DNSClass". Failure after failure after failure. It was literally like my DNS service was caught in some sort of infinite loop. What is this noise?

I found out that Microsoft was trying to be proactive with Server 2008 R2, and, by default, they enabled a new DNS format that hasn't quite yet been adopted by everybody yet. Like IP V6, this format, EDNS, is not yet everywhere. Bad news for me, because it was causing me pain.

I really don't have a whole lot of experience with DNS, other than adding records and whatnot, so how to disable this EDNS?
I found on TechNet there is a little tool, dnscmd, that will do the trick. So, all I did to disable it was to run dnscmd /config /EnableEDnsProbes 0

Immediately, my memory dropped from 35MB per core to about 2MB total. ColaSoft reported no new format errors. For now, it seems as if EDNS is not yet ready for the real world.