Windows patching is an unfortunate requirement for all Windows administrators. Patch Tuesdays keep coming with no end in sight. Many people use Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to keep their Windows servers patched; it’s free and works for the most part. The problem is it’s yet another server you have to manage. It also usually […] The post Using AWS System Manager Feature for Fast Windows Patching appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

PowerShell Split Operator In another tutorial we saw how we are able to use Join operator and what we are able to do with it. In this tutorial we will look into PowerShell Split Operator, how we are able to use it and what we can do with it. The split operator allows you to... Read More The post PowerShell Split Operator appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

Please join us as Kevin Marquette takes us for a deep dive into Hashtables and Arrays.

In an effort to spread my love of Windows PowerShell scheduled jobs, this is the start of series on the subject.

Amazon’s CloudWatch is a powerful AWS service which monitors deployed systems, and can respond with alerts or even react by calling another AWS service. CloudWatch alarm creation is typically done via the AWS Management Console, but today I’m going to show you how to configure an alarm yourself. When you’re talking about automating deployments of entire environments, scripting your CloudWatch alarm’s creation becomes necessary especially as the environment increases in complexity and scope.

Not feeling the love from Microsoft for Windows Server anymore?Well, Microsoft is trying to change that… On Tuesday, June 26th 2018, Microsoft will be hosting a virtual event Windows Server Summit.This free event will provide you insights on Windows Server, explore the roadmap for Windows Server, discover new skills and best practices and get your […]

On my list I have a couple of PowerShell related subjects I want/need to learn more about. These include, but are not limited to parallelization, GitHub, DSC, PowerShell Core, JEA, Plaster, DBAtools and DBAchecks. I have been playing around a bit already with parallelization and Github and the next thing on my list was Pester. […]

We are just moving some of our monitoring to ZABBIX (old love never dies), and I was wondering if it is possible to somehow hide passwords – for me it was a huge security breach as I would like to grant access for someone to configuration – but I do not want that person to … Continue reading “Encrypting” the password field in web scenario authentication in ZABBIX.

This blog article is the first guest post ever on this site. When I’m approached by someone who wants to write a guest blog article, I suggest that they should start their own blog. If they’re simply not interested in that, I put them in contact with PowerShell.org because it seems like a more appropriate place to publish community blog articles. The majority of the posts on this site are simply the steps of how I’ve done something in a real-world production environment.

I recently started an IT career development platform called TechSnips. During this time, I’ve gotten the chance to craft my purpose more. I’ve learned I really enjoy lifting others’ up and showing them how to capitalize on all that knowledge in their head. I’ve been able to leverage the skills I learned on my job, […] The post The Game Changer Reward: Your Chance for an Awesome Career in IT appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

PowerShell Users and Membership – Part 2 Scenario: PowerShell Users and Membership – Part 2 In part 1, I have shown you a simple script on how you are able to list all users or under a specific location along with their membership. The problem with that script is that you can only get the... Read More The post PowerShell Users and Membership – Part 2 appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

Maybe you have a login script or something else that’s written in PowerShell that you want to run without having any kind of window pop up – not even a blank one. There’s a few waysRead More...

Serverless computing, or the ability to execute code without having to manage the underlying resources, is all the rage these days. Can PowerShell join in on the fun? Yes it can! This article will show you how to use PowerShell to create an Azure Functions app and deploy a PowerShell-based function. What Are Azure Functions? Azure Functions is a computing model in Microsoft Azure that allows you to execute small pieces of code or functions in response to events.

If you like this video, please subscribe to my youtube channel here which is the motivation for me to create more such videos 🙂 thank you!   Follow @SinghPrateik Subscribe... The post Azure Cloud Shell Overview appeared first on Ridicurious.

Hard to believe the year is almost have over. Other than the PowerShell Summit, most of my travel this first half of the year has been for private PowerShell classes. After taking some well-earned rest with my family I will be back on the road towards the end of the summer. I have a number […]

My name is Adam Bertram and Brandon has so graciously allowed me to guest post on his blog about a new service I’ve started that offers free, how-to content for tech professionals. OK, here’s the pitch: We’re geeks, right? We love tinkering with tech and figuring out better ways to solve problems. How cool would it be if lots of us could come together under one platform and share our hard-earned knowledge with everyone else via technical demo screencasts? I’m glad you asked! I recently launched an e-learning platform called TechSnips.

PowerShell Redirection Operators In this tutorial we will go through PowerShell Redirection Operators. PowerShell by default sends the output of the commands, warnings and errors in the console. You are able to send those outputs to files in order to store them. There are different ways to redirect the output to files: Out-File Tee-Object Set-Content... Read More The post PowerShell Redirection Operators appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

Planet PowerShell Planet PowerShell has grown over the last 18 months since its launch. The community has grown to over 60 talented individuals, with great content posted every day. During this time, I've been very cautious of making many significant changes, but this is about to change.

Distributed File System (DFS) has some service dependencies - so if those don’t start the DFS Namespace service will also not start. The dependencies are: Remote Registry Security Accounts Manager Server Workstation I have seen the Remote Registry service become the culprit of the DFS-N service not starting. In my experience, this had been caused by antivirus software changing the Remote Registry service to Disabled start-up type so when the DFS-N server restarts, one of the dependency services: Remote Registry does not start so if you have issues with the DFS-N service not starting – check the Remote Registry Start-up type is configured to Automatic and click Start to confirm there are no errors and try starting the DFS-N service again.

GitHub recently announced new features and support for multiple issue templates. Before, GitHub supported a single template, by supporting multiple types of issues, we can gather the right information from the beginning. When we create multiple issue templates, users will be prompted to specify the type of issue they want to create. We can target specific questions or information requests for specific types of issues.

Although the new versions of Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 no longer install SMB1 as default, the majority of us are still using older systems, such as earlier versions of Windows 10, Windows 7 and Server 2012 R2 which still has SMB1 enabled. Unfortunately, you may still find legacy systems in your environments that might rely on SMB1, such as legacy Windows Server 2003 or Linux systems, so this is something you shouldn’t just do on systems without validating beforehand, the downside is this is a VERY insecure protocol (as evidenced by WannaCry and other attacks which targeted that protocol) which needs to be eradicated from any use! To be clearer all you need to do is read this article from Ned Pyle from Microsoft back in 2016.

Microsoft Azure has a good user portal where you can do most things, however when it comes to automation, gathering a lot of information at once and more in-depth scenarios that the Portal doesn’t quite offer – PowerShell is used. Before you can use PowerShell to connect to Microsoft Azure, you need to install the Azure Resource Manager modules first – follow the guide below: Install and configure Azure PowerShell Once the AzureRM module has been installed – you can now connect to Azure.

In my previous post #PowerShell – Create a simple GUI form in seconds I wrote about a script I made to easily create a GUI. After posting it, a colleague of mine said he had seen a great solution for creating GUIs on Reddit called Anybox. Anybox is created by Donald Mellenbruch (@dm3ll3n) and is available […]

I have been teaching and presenting about PowerShell for over 10 years. I always put a great emphasis on doing as I firmly believe that is the best way to learn something like PowerShell. I’ve also heard a number of people over the years say that they want to learn and do more with PowerShell […]

Have you ever run into a problem where the results from a PowerShell command are returned in scientific notation? I’ve recently been working with performance counters in PowerShell and I’ve run into several scenarios where this occurs such as the one shown in the following example. In addition to returning the results in the previous example, they were also stored in a variable so the same value could be used throughout this blog article.

While people frequently use Chocolatey for personal devices, it is also an excellent tool to use for managing software for organizations. One of the great components of Chocolatey is the community software repository, which has over 5,800 unique Windows packages at the moment. For personal use, it is not a […] The post Install internalized Chocolatey packages from your offline repository appeared first on WinSysBlog.

With this post, I’ve got a new post up on this blog every Wednesday morning for a year. I’m pretty proud of that! There are certainly more prolific bloggers out there, especially in this space, butRead More...

While looking to automate the installation of Jenkins I needed to get a list of installed plugins into a plugins.txt file to be used by the automated install process. It’s possible to view them in the GUI, but not get an easy export: It’s possible to query the API to get this information: Note: my test … Continue reading List Installed Jenkins Plugins with PowerShell →

In this post, you will learn how to install the AWS Tools for PowerShell Core. The AWS (Amazon Web Services) Tools for PowerShell Core are modules built upon functionalities exposed... The post Install AWS Tools for PowerShell Core 6.0.2 appeared first on Ridicurious.

Writing a PowerShell module was a goal that I’ve had for myself since I learned of PowerShell Gallery and helper modules such as Plaster, PSDeploy, BuildHelpers, InvokeBuild, and Pester. I have never worked with CI/CD build pipelines prior to this and a tool like AppVeyor was extremely foreign. I’m really happy with the progress that...

Update: There was an update to this post on June 6, 2018. See below. I had kind of hoped my 300th post here at tommymaynard.com would have lined up with June 2018, but that isn’t going to happen. Instead, welcome to post 287. We’re just 13 posts away from reaching post 300. There’s just too […]

The correct way to write a PowerShell function that works with file paths from the pipeline requires some effort, but it will make your PowerShell scripts work more reliably. Suppose we want to write a function that counts the number of lines in a text file, and we want to pipe those files to our function. Cmdlets like Get-Item, Get-ChildItem, and Get-Content all accept input from the pipeline, but how do we write a function that behaves similarly to the core cmdlets? Let’s see how we would go about creating our own function that supports this workflow.

There are many times in an organization, especially in larger international organizations, where it becomes necessary to manage the languages your users have access to via their keyboard. Adding Languages It’s pretty simple to look at the language list, as Powershell has a built in cmdlet for this. $LanguageList = Get-WinUserLanguageList When we view the contents of $LanguageList, we will see the object that is returned, and if U.

In less than two weeks (on 16th June) it's time for SQL Saturday Athens and I'm proud to announce that I will be speaking! This will be my first SQL Saturday ever both as speaker and attendee outside Portugal so I'm especially thrilled and excited to be part of it! I will be presenting my … Continue reading SQL Saturday #731 Athens 2018

PowerShell Hardware Inventory Script – Part 2 Scenario: PowerShell Hardware Inventory Script – Part 2. In Part 1, we saw how we are able to create a simple inventory of our computers based on Active Directory. In this part we will go through the minor additional features of the script that in my opinion will... Read More The post PowerShell Hardware Inventory Script – Part 2 appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

When I first saw the announcement of Planet PowerShell I loved the concept of having blog posts aggregated in a single place  to thought it was a great idea to aggregate PowerShell related blog posts. I wanted to have my blog added to it as well. But at the time when I saw the requirements, […]

If you have a PowerShell blog, I can't overstate how valuable it is to get your feed hooked up to Planet PowerShell!

IntroAt least once a week I am either directly asked to @-mentioned into a question about why Invoke-RestMethod and/or ConvertFrom-Json don’t play nice with the pipeline. I decided to put this into a blog post so I can just point people to it in the future.Note that this blog entry was written while PowerShell 6.0.2 was current and 6.1.0 was on the way. This behavior may change in future versions.This IssueThe issue is best demonstrated with some code:$Uri = ' https://api.

As a PowerShell person I’m personally not a big fan of creating a GUI for PowerShell scripts. This is however something that is asked a lot when PowerShell scripts are created for by example provisioning new users. I’ve seen many different approaches to this. Most worked around it either by using Read-Host or creating a GUI […]

Bing Search Images using PowerShell Module for Azure Cognitive Services In this demo, PowerShell Module for Azure Cognitive Service is utilized to programmatically Bing Search Images with a Keyword, then... The post Bing Search Images, detect Emotions, Save with PowerShell & Azure appeared first on Ridicurious.

If you have a PowerShell script you’d like to run constantly in the background and start up automatically after a reboot, the best option is to run it as a Windows service. I’ll show you how to set this up using NSSM, the Non-Sucking Service Manager. The Scenario Most PowerShell scripts aim to run a task and then exit. You’ll usually execute a script from the PowerShell console or perhaps trigger it periodically via the Windows Task Scheduler.

You’re the administrator of an on-premises Exchange Server 2010 environment that’s in Hybrid mode. After migrating a few users to Office 365, you start receiving complaints that they’re no longer able to send emails as their departments group. First, follow the instructions in one of my previous blog articles to “Connect to Office 365 using PowerShell“. The following command grants John Doe the ability to send as the Facility Services group in Office 365.

If you’ve been using PowerShell for any length of time in the past few years, you have undoubtedly heard of Pester. If not, then you’re probably living in a strange parallel universe where the Zune is still a thing. In any case, Pester is THE testing framework for PowerShell and is a must-have tool in your Infrastructure Developer toolbox. I say Infrastructure Developer because that is what we are.

If you’ve written at least a couple of advanced PowerShell functions, you’re probably no stranger to parameter validation. These are the attributes you attach to parameters to make sure that they match a certain regular expressionRead More...

PowerShell Assignment Operators In this tutorial we will go through PowerShell Assignement Operators. These operators assign a value to multiple values to a variable. Assignment operators are also able to perform numeric operations before the assignment of a value to the variable. We will go through the list of PowerShell assignment operators and see few... Read More The post PowerShell Assignment Operators appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

In This Article Introducing the PSCodeHealth VSTS Extension Installing the Extension in VSTS Using the Task in a Build Definition Enforcing the Quality Gate Conclusion Introducing the PSCodeHealth VSTS Extension We have already taken a detailed look at PSCodeHealth and how we can really unleash its usefulness in a release pipeline. So if you care about coding standards and/or quality of your PowerShell code and you use Visual Studio Team Services to build/release your PowerShell projects, you will probably be interested in the PSCodeHealth VSTS extension.

A quick demo on how to create a time-triggered, serverless Azure Function to randomly fetch video contents, I’ve posted on my youtube channel and tweet it on my twitter profile... The post YouTube content to Twitter posts with PowerShell & Time Triggered Azure Function appeared first on Ridicurious.

This morning I was up at 4 AM, live streaming the creation of an auto-tweet script.

A quick demo on How to encode PowerShell scripts or cmdlets to a Base64 encoded String and run them Obfuscated using a Base64 encoded string as an input.    Follow... The post Running Encoded Commands with PowerShell appeared first on Ridicurious.

I haven’t geeked out on an app or some kind of service like this for a really long time. I’ve done a few steps in the past on productivity and time management and personal project apps and services, stuff like that. I’m a big proponent of purposely managing your time I think it’s all about […] The post I Finally Found It! A Smart Task Management App appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.