dbachecks has seen the light about two months ago. As I'm writing this blog post, the module counts with more than 2600 downloads just from the PowerShell gallery. The module has about 110 configurable checks that make our live easier! Today I will write about an option that I think users still do not realize … Continue reading dbachecks – Setting temporary configuration values

Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery Review In this post we will review the Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery Review. This is a very easy to use tool to recover corrupted mailboxes or items within mailboxes. Lets check first the information that is provided by Stellar Phoenix and then we will check few thing on how... Read More The post Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery Review appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

I lead a team that builds highly shared, deep-in-the-stack automation at a large SaaS company that has many software stacks in AWS. This automation includes things like installing security scanners, log collection agents and monitoring agents - all for both Windows and Linux. I inherited a lot of this code and was working together with a team member and a technician from the software company for one of these agents that was giving us trouble when I realized we could improve the ruggedness of our code significantly.

After a busy week at the PowerShell Conference Europe last week, blog post about this event is coming up soon! This week will be all about cloud based automation in both the form of Azure Functions as well as Microsoft Flow. I will be speaking about this at the UK Cloud Infrastructure User Group, PowerShell Southampton, WinOps, PowerShell […]

I took a few hours last week and familiarized myself with Plaster. And no, not the walls and ceiling home improvement project Plaster — Microsoft’s Plaster. The one that requires you search for it alongside the search term PowerShell, otherwise you’ll never get close to what I’m going to briefly discuss. Plaster allows you to […]

Every now and again I see some people complaining about not getting the properties they want when using a PowerShell command. For instance, someone was using the Get-Service command to query what was the "Startup Type" of WinRM service. For that the person used the following command: which produces the following output: As you can … Continue reading Is this command broken? I can’t see

Welcome back to part 2 of my week at the PowerShell Summit 2018. Let’s dive right in! A lot of the “How to accelerate your career and others by proving you’re a badass” session was about how I talked about putting value in your bucket every time you make a blog post, do a user […] The post PowerShell Summit 2018 – A Week in Review Part 2 appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

Was macht man so am letzten Tag der PSConfEu, schaut es euch an: Sessions Hybrid Lab Automation @raimundandree @NyanHP Schaut euch dieses Tool unbedingt an! Die beiden Kollegen haben AutomatedLab etwas genauer vorgestellt und viele damit begeistert. AutomatedLab erstellt verschiedene … Weiterlesen →

Humbling and rewarding, those are two of the best terms I can think of that represent how I feel about this year’s PowerShell and DevOps Summit of 2018. If you’ve never attended this conference and you follow my blog or are really into a lot of the other PowerShell blogs, PowerShell content, and PowerShell people, […] The post PowerShell Summit 2018 – A Week in Review Part 1 appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

Table of Contents – Mocking the Unmockable With this chapter, we’re right back into unit testing, mocking, and removing dependencies on which our code is reliant. Remember that our last chapter review was on infrastructure validation, which put us in position to ensure dependencies. But not so much today; today we’ll continue our previous, previous […]

I’m probably an expert at winging things because it’s a skill that I’ve accumulated throughout the years of trying to almost battle my true nature. I know it’s a true nature of a lot of tech folk because we’re all kind of that left-brain engineer mindset; we all want to plan out everything because we […] The post Why Winging It Is the Key to Improving Your Confidence appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

Когда вы добавляете пользователя в одну из защищенных групп, таких как: ‘Account Operators’, ‘Administrators’, ‘Backup Operators’, ‘Domain Admins’, ‘Domain Controllers’, ‘Enterprise Admins’, ‘Print Operators’, ‘Read-only Domain Controllers’, ‘Replicator’, ‘Schema Admins’ or ‘Server Operators’, он также становится защищенным.

Tag drei und weiterhin Motiviert, durch die vielen Ideen und Anregungen. Mein PSConf – Tag drei zusammengefasst: PowerShell for SharePoint Online – How DevOps is making SharePoint Admins feel loved again @slkrck Das erste Mal ist es Rick Taylor passiert, … Weiterlesen →

You may be the smartest person in your organization or in the world but if no one knows about it, it doesn’t mean a thing. That’s an extremely powerful saying to me because it’s true. That’s sort of the situation that IT professionals, software developers, and tech people get into because we all have that […] The post Marketing – The Essential Skill for Engineers That Don’t Think So appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

I’m working on the next chapter review of The Pester Book, and I had a thought. I was about to add the first, below paragraph to that review, but it ultimately just didn’t make sense to include it there. And so here we are: a sidebar of thought, I thought I would share. I want […]

In this article, I will show how to deploy the Chocolatey Agent Service which allows end users to use a GUI to choose what packages to install or uninstall. Of all the cool technology I have come across the last few years in the Windows world, Chocolatey is still my […] The post Implementing Chocolatey Self-Service For Non-Admin Users appeared first on WinSysBlog.

PowerShell Logical Operators Last time we saw the PowerShell Comparison Operators. This post will be about PowerShell Logical Operators. Logical Operators allow us to connect different statements together and/or expression. By doing so, we will be able to have one more complex expression based on different conditions and statements. The operators are very important and... Read More The post PowerShell Logical Operators appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

While presenting one of my presentations at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit last week, I demonstrated why you wouldn’t want to use ValidatePattern for parameter validation because of the useless error message that it returns when the input doesn’t match the regular expression that’s being used for validation. I then demonstrated how ValidateScript could be used to build a better ValidatePattern.

Spurred on by a common issue that comes up on Twitter from time to time, this will be a rather short post about CSVs and PowerShell. What’s the Issue? Let’s say you have an array of strings. $Servers = @( 'AD1', 'FILE1', 'DB1', 'APP1' ) You want to save these to disk. CSVs are pretty handy, right? And there is a cmdlet that’ll handle this for you! $Servers | Export-Csv -Path C:\temp\servers.

Tag zwei und erster vollständiger Konferenztag, die Sessions für den diesigen Tag habe ich mir ausgesucht und trotz des langen Abends war die Session sehr gut besucht. Case of the Unexplained – PowerShell Edition @poshboth Ein interessanter Start in den … Weiterlesen →

For IT professionals, engineers, all of us logical left-brain people. We have a natural tendency to either say something is right or something is wrong. You’re either smart or you’re dumb; black or white, there is not gray in the world for a lot of engineers. If that sounds familiar to you, that’s how I […] The post Black and White Are Only Two Colors Among Millions appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

I’ve just got back from the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit in Bellevue, WA where I had the great pleasure of attending tons of excellent sessions on a bunch of PowerShell and DevOps topics. The mainRead More...

I was just at the PowerShell and DevOps Summit last week. It was great to meet so many of the people that I have worked with online. I also walked way with several ideas that I wanted to work on. One idea came to me while sitting in Kirk Munro’s...

Die Keynotes Junge Hip Hop Tänzer eröffneten die PowerShell Konferenz 2018. Im Folgenden leitete uns Tobias Weltner durch die Opening Zeremonie. Deren Inhalt bestand weitestgehend aus generellen Infos, verspricht aber auch eine interessante Konferenz. Denn 320 Teilnehmer aus 31 Ländern … Weiterlesen →

Table of Contents – Infrastructure Validation This chapter is the one I’ve been expecting all along, and that’s most likely due to it being a selling point of Pester, in my opinion. That’s infrastructure validation, or infrastructure testing, and I’ve seen it discussed in several blog posts prior to its chapter breakdown here. This testing had […]

I am awesome! I feel awesome all the time, I never have a down day. I love life every second of the day and generally, I’m just the best thing since sliced bread. No, that’s totally wrong. I’m a normal human being. I have ups, I have downs; I have bad days, I have good […] The post You Will Not Believe How Awesome My Life Is Right Now appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

If you manage both Windows and Linux in your environment (which almost everyone does) why would you want to use more than one method to remotely manage computers? The correct answer is, you shouldn’t. Most PowerShell users currently use WS-Management for remoting into their Windows machines, but this is a […] The post Remote Into Other Computers – OpenSSH On Windows appeared first on WinSysBlog.

PowerShell Comparison Operators This tutorial will provide you information about PowerShell Comparison Operators. Comparison operators are used widely when you are writing your scripts. They will help you to test, compare, find, modify replace data and information. The comparison operators, as per Microsoft, are divided into those five types. Types of comparison operators: Equality Matching... Read More The post PowerShell Comparison Operators appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

After another three flights, and 16 hours in the air, I’m back home in New Zealand. I can certainly say that the change in time zones has hit me harder coming back. Going over to Bellevue, I got right into things and felt (for the most part) normal. Last week I did a blog post for each day of the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, going over what I took part in that day and what my main takeaways were.

One day I woke up to a “Strategic Business Announcement” email. Laden with phrases like “strategic shift in our business”, “near-term growth drivers” and “sharpening our focus”, the email was announcing that a huge company project I was involved with was killed leading to a 6% reduction in force because it didn’t meet shareholder expectations. […] The post I Gave up a $150k/Year Job to Pursue My Dreams appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

PowerShell Summit 2018 was one of the most humbling and rewarding trips I’ve ever been on. I was given an award from Microsoft for my community work, I learned a ton from the sessions and I connected with so many people around the world where I was able to get first-hand feedback on how my […] The post Don’t Let Your Inner Introvert Define Who you Are appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

Table of Contents – Working with Pester Output After the length of the last chapter, this one, was much appreciated. That said, the last chapter may have been the best one thus far, so don’t skip it. I suspect I may head back and read it again, a time or two. In this chapter, however, we […]

Short, personal story, about the biggest PowerShell conference in Europe. https://dombrosblog.wordpress.com/psconfeu-2017-en/ (in English) https://dombrosblog.wordpress.com/psconfeu-2017-pl/ (in Polish) How will it be this year? We’ll find out in a moment ;)… I can’t wait 🙂

Long absence I know I haven’t posted in a while. Most of this is beacuse I was preparing my talks for PSConfEU and other events lately. Besides our regular PPoSh Meetups (which you can find here) I was invited to give a talk for SysOps DevOps Polska about Checklists and how it can be sexy. […]

Table of Contents – Adding Tests – Again If you haven’t yet read this chapter yet, then buckle up. It’s purposely long, as Adam indicates that he didn’t go into a good amount of detail in the last take-an-existing-function-and-add-tests-to-it example/chapter. With that, let’s discuss. The first few sections we’re actually quite helpful. The whole thing […]

Basic details of your computer like operating system and version, memory, network adapter and hard drive are never stored in one central location. You always have to go clicking around for it. But if you’ve got Python installed, we can build a script that collects all of that information and returns all of the details […] The post How to Create a Computer Inventory Script in Python for Windows appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

Hey Guys, So just recently I came across software from Stellar to recovery Exchange mailboxes. There are plenty of videos that recommend that software. Here you can find User guide and Installation guide. Knowledge base is also easily accessible here. Software is recommended by many MVPs and engineers, so it got my attention. Reading the … Continue reading Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Re

Invoke-Command oder New-PSSession, die Frage stelle ich mir recht häufig, wenn CmdLets den ComputerName Parameter nicht beinhalten. In Skripten ist es sicherlich eine Mischung zwischen New-PssSession und Invoke-Command. Wie sieht das aber im täglichen Gebrauch aus? Verbindet ihr euch immer … Weiterlesen →

Table of Contents – Adding Tests for a Function In this chapter, the overall idea was to take an existing function, such as you might have sitting around right now, and write tests for it. There are likely functions and tools that we already have that don’t have a tests, and with the help of […]

4 ways to select Unique items in Powershell Following are the approaches that I could come up with, there may be few more, feel free to point them out and... The post 4 ways to select Unique items in PowerShell appeared first on Ridicurious.

My final day at Summit was filled with more great presentations by some brilliant community leaders. First was the talk by Jeff Hicks on CSV, JSON and XML. Jeff pointed out and demo’d many interesting ways to deal with these data formats and the advantages/disadvantages to each. Next, I caught […] The post My PowerShell Summit Experience – Part 5: The End appeared first on WinSysBlog.

So just today I learned new thing, I was missing New-ComplianceSearch cmdlet, I was a bit frustrated because I was in all the relevant groups: Technet was not mentioning a WORD about one thing, I was able to use compliance cmdlets only after I connected diffrently, so if this is your connection string: Change it … Continue reading New-ComplianceSearch not visible in Exchange Online despite b

That’s it. It’s over. I’ve shaken many hand, met many people, and seen lots of PowerShell. This’ll be the last of my recap posts, and in a couple of days I’ll be following up with a “this was Summit, and you should be there next year” type post. Please do read the previous three recaps if you haven’t already! Managing Advanced DSC Configurations and Configuration Data Jason Helmick “Do you want your morning to be easy?” I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again today: Jason’s energy is amazing.

I spent the week at Suffolk Law School’s Clinnnovation conference, followed by a great summit where we discussed how to train the next generation of lawyers to code. Imagining a group of excited new coders Read more…

Day 3 of Summit for me was largely more great breakout sessions, hosted by some brilliant presenters. First off was Lee Holmes who discussed “Defending against PowerShell attacks”. I think Lee is probably one of the few people who can retain my attention for an hour and 45 minutes straight. […] The post My PowerShell Summit Experience – Part 4: Lee Holmes, Plaster and Chocolatey appeared first on WinSysBlog.

PowerShell Active Directory Delegation – Part 3 Scenario This is the last part of the series PowerShell Active Directory Delegation. In the previous parts, we have discussed how we can have Active Directory delegation, so we will give access to the administrators without the need of providing them domain admin permissions. This time we have... Read More The post PowerShell Active Directory Delegation – Part 3 appeared first on Stephanos Constantinou Blog.

Introduction to “PowerShell Scripting guide to Python: Data Structure” This is the third article in “PowerShell Scripting guide to Python” blog series and we are covering Data Structure today. If you are new... The post PowerShell Scripting guide to Python : Part-3 | Data Structure appeared first on Ridicurious.

What a day. Today was the reason I was able to be here at Summit. Today was the day I presented in front of about 100 people. If you haven’t read the previous recap posts, please do check them out! Define, Develop and Deploy DSC Resources Jeff Hicks I walked out of this session feeling well armed to start working on my own DSC resources. Until now I’ve known I’m going to need to do it at some stage but hadn’t actually looked into the process of doing so.

PASS Summit is the largest conference for technical professionals who leverage the Microsoft Data Platform. PASS Summit 2018 is happening November 5th – 9th 2018 in Seattle. It is an amazing conference. I attended last year and thoroughly enjoyed every minute. It is a whole week of opportunities to learn from and network with people from all over […]

If you enjoy writing PowerShell, love automation in the Microsoft space, geek out on configuration management or consider yourself an Azure ninja, the DevOps Collective’s PowerShell/DevOps Summit is for you. This conference is a highly technical, deep-dive on various topics around automation in the Microsoft space. You’ll find a plethora of sessions from InfoSec, DevOps, […] The post PowerShell/DevOps Summit 2018 appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.