There was I, deploying PSPasswordExpiryNotifications for one of my Clients when I started getting complaints that some users are not getting their Password Expiry Notifications. Well, that's a new one. I've tested this script multiple times, and it worked just fine. So I dive into the details of my script to see what I did in there (I don't even remember anymore - it just works) to find out this little line: The post Fixing Active Directory PasswordNotRequired with PowerShell appeared first on Evotec.

The post How to add MDT applications with Chocolatey package manager appeared first on WinSysBlog.

Microsoft shared an Office 365 Free DMARC solution a few days ago, with a partnership with ValiMail. You can subscribe to the service on this link. You can read the complete announcement there. I found it to be an excellent news to be able to get some DMARC insights free of charges, so I tried it, hereunder my firsts impressions. Subscribe First, you need to subscribe to the service on ValiMail’s site.

The post Get started with PowerShell Core on Linux appeared first on WinSysBlog.

I've been working today trying to deliver to one of my Clients Active Directory documentation. To my surprise, something that worked fine for a very long time has started to provide weird results. So, after spending about 8 hours taking apart a few of my PowerShell modules trying to find out what is wrong finally, I've found it: Export-CliXML / Import-CliXML. Those two commands are great. I've used them multiple times with great success (or so I thought).

Using the Office 365 CLI, you can manage your Microsoft Office 365 tenant and SharePoint Framework projects on any platform. No matter if you are on Windows, macOS or Linux, using Bash, Cmder or PowerShell, using the Office 365 CLI you can configure Office 365, manage SharePoint Framework projects and build automation scripts. Office 365 CLI is an open-source project driven by the SharePoint Patterns and Practices initiative.

The post Deploy a VM from a template with VMware PowerCLI appeared first on WinSysBlog.

Everything should start with a SOLID plan, not just influenced by the enthusiasm of a successful PoC, briefly tested and blessed/approved by the management where the implementation challenges are hidden in plain sight! I wanted to write this article since I’ve started scriptinglibrary.com, but I will try to keep this article to a technical level … Continue reading "Cloud Tools for Azur

Words: 780 Time to read: ~ 4 minutes Version 1.0 is coming… 20th June 2019 and dbatools will release version 1.0 Now, I don’t remember how I started with dbatools. I know that I was a Junior DBA at that stage and I was experimenting with PowerShell. After being initially introduced to PowerShell when it … Continue reading "dbatools 1.0. The tools to break down barriers."

Announced at DataGrillen 2019 today, the amazing dbatools PowerShell module has officially released version 1.0. This is a tremendous milestone for the best Open Source project built for data professionals. What started out as a single PowerShell script for migrating SQL Server instances in Chrissy LeMaire’s (blog | twitter) datacenter has become the most important … Continue reading "dbatools One Point OH YEAH!"The post dbatools One Point OH YEAH! appeared first on FLX SQL with Andy Levy.

The post Use Puppet for Windows ops automation with dsc_lite appeared first on WinSysBlog.

We recently started a fun project, doing some mailbox migration. For this project, in particular, we were merging four Exchange organizations together and the new Active Directory was to consist of brand new user accounts. In other words, we’re not moving the accounts themselves but just the mailbox. The solution was a mixture of what docs.microsoft.com and many of the...

Dear reader, before continue please open a PowerShell console and run the following command: If you are doing this on the date of this blog post, you have just installed dbatools v1.0! After more than 200 commits, the work of more than 20 contributors and 20 days since the last published version, dbatools v1.0 is […]

There are some user attributes that are are easily visible through the Active Directory Users and Computers GUI, but when it comes to finding and setting them in a bulk/automated way, it’s a little trickier.  Specifically, the userAccountControl attribute. You can see the details of the attribute here, and the types of data this single... Continue reading →

There are no cmdlets more familiar to newcomers and experts alike than the PowerShell cmdlet Get-Help. Due to PowerShell’s integrated and updatable help system, the Get-Help command is the way you discover what commands do, their parameters and even (hopefully) lots of useful examples of how to use the command. Every cmdlet and function you […] The post Get-Help: Your Gateway to All the PowerShell Things appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

Currently I am doing a Skype for Business migration for a large enterprise. The current phone system is Cisco Call Manager and I am migrating everything to Skype for Business / Microsoft Teams in Office 365. I am at a point where I have migrated a majority of my local users but I want to make sure I grab all available phone numbers I can. These phone numbers could be left from old users, systems, etc.

The post Getting started with AWS Tools for PowerShell appeared first on WinSysBlog.

A few months ago when I first released Dashimo, I've promised that Charts will come. Unfortunately, time passed by, and there were no Charts in sight. It's not that I didn't want to deliver, I just wasn't sure on the way I want to allow charts building. Today after playing with the idea for a while I've decided to release essential support for diagrams, with a couple of other fixes. Some of that stuff is already there for longer while I just never announced it.

Change Active Directory Password Remotely Hello, Today I wanted to share a small tips about a feature that is not widely known. Indeed, a lot of people deploy AD FS for Office 365 without knowing the full capabilities of this feature. AD FS offer the possibility to each AD user to change their password without being on the LAN. If your AD FS farm is exposed on the internet, you can then use the AD FS to change your AD password.

Today I saw an article on how to get Windows Version Report from Active Directory and thought that this is a cool idea. Something handy for migration scenarios or information on how up to date is your infrastructure. Since there are many ways to do the same thing I decided to tackle this myself and further include it into PSWinDocumentation.AD project. By default Active Directory stores Operating System and Operating System Version but it doesn't really show versions one may expect.

When it comes to security, most people normally approach it at one extreme or the other. Some people do nothing and don’t worry about it. All I can say for those folks is good luck with that and I hope your resume is updated. Others go into full blown panic mode, especially those who don’t take the time to understand vulnerabilities. Many security folks and articles on the Internet don’t help much either because they often blow things out of proportion which puts many of the people in the second category into panic mode.

The PSCredential object is an extremely common object in PowerShell but requires the use of the Get-Credential command which is interactive. We can create a PSCredential object non-interactively to create these objects inside of our PowerShell scripts! Normally, when you need to create a PSCredential object, you’ll use the Get-Credential command like $cred = Get-Credential. […] The post How to Create a PowerShell Credential (PSCredential) appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

  One of the most common uses of the Microsoft Azure cloud for administrators is virtual machines (VMs). It’s easy to create Azure VMs, but it’s not quite as intuitive to remove one. Sure, you can go to the Azure Portal, find your VM and remove it easy enough. You could also use the Remove-AzVM […] The post How to Remove an Azure Virtual Machine and Cleanup with PowerShell appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

After building my Pluralsight course Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services: Custom Text to Speech, I’ve been playing around more with Azure’s various APIs. I recently found myself using the Azure Video Indexer and decided to begin poking at it with PowerShell. Here’s a brief rundown. To get started, you either first have to sign up for […] The post Getting Started with Azure Video Indexer and PowerShell appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

To learn Docker is becoming one of the most sought-after skills out there today. Docker has revolutionized the way containers are built and managed making this skill a prized asset for employers. Learning Docker from the ground up though can be a challenge if you haven’t had the chance to get much experience with it. […] The post Learn Docker from Scratch by the Experts appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

One of the great features of the Windows Enterprise issuing CAs, is the auto-renew option that you can set for your certificates. BUT, when renewal time rolls around, how do you know if it’s worked? Or more specifically, are you just sitting around hoping that the auto-renewal worked and nothing breaks?   In my scenario,... Continue reading →

Sometimes cmdlets are asking for plain-text passwords instead of Secure Strings. And the New-SmbMapping cmdlet (developed by Microsoft! Huh!) is one of them...

Here’s my PowerShell.org posts for May 2019 — enjoy! May 2019 Filled-In AD Notes Field – May 31, 2019

I often find myself opening the Group Policy Management Console, and wondering “are all of these GPOs actually being used?”.  And if not, how do we go about finding GPOs that could be cleaned-up? The script below is a little long, and though heavily commented, the summary of the logic is: Find all GPOs linked... Continue reading →

I recently worked with a vendor to remove an old application that was no longer being used from a server in one of my customer’s environments. While many applications may be left to die on the server long after they’re needed, this particular one transmitted data to a partner company so it definitely needed to be removed. The problem is the application was so old that no one knew which server of the hundreds of servers it was running on.

I've been working last few hours trying to set up my laptop for PowerShell Conference, and one of the tasks is to get my modules up and running. To my surprise on Windows 10 1903 Install-Module thrown a weird error The post Install-module : The ‘install-module’ command was found in the module ‘PowerShellGet’, but the module could not be loaded. appeared first on Evotec.

There are a number of PowerShell “best practices” out there, and the one that I think that is most misunderstood is:   Avoid Excessive Comments (over-commenting)   The theory (probably correctly) says that your code should be self-documenting/self-explanatory, and should include things like: Using meaningful variable names (eg: use $username instead of $u, so you... Continue

I am very happy to announce that registration is open for a 4 day class I will be presenting this fall on Securing PowerShell. The class will be held in Helsinki, Finland which should make it easily accessible for anyone in Europe. This 4 day instructor-led course is designed for IT Professionals who want to […] Check out my PowerShell Essentials page https://jdhitsolutions.com/blog/essentia

New Releases PowerShell 7 Preview Release date: 2019-05-30 – Release Page: Github The new release of PowerShell (formerly Core) is getting a new naming convention and porting code to .NET Core 3. You can read more about it here. Blog Articles PowerShell 7 Road Maphttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/powershell-7-road-map/ An Example Azure DevOps Build Pipeline for PowerShell moduleshttps://adamrushuk.

AWS Lambda functions enable you to run code without worrying about what server it runs on — even if you work in a Microsoft shop. This serverless, event-driven compute service... The post Step-by-Step guide to AWS Lambda with PowerShell Core appeared first on Ridicurious.

While working, and re-working through the problem of tracking changes to AD group memberships (see HERE) the final “production” script that I wrote came out to over 300 lines and ended up being a little different to what I put in that previous post.  In practice some of the groups the script was tracking had... Continue reading →

Super action spies like Ethan Hunt, Jason Borne and Evelyn Salt live in an ethos of getting the job done no matter what! They complete their missions in vastly diverse conditions and in the face of the unexpected. Super spies make use of specialized tools and techniques when available (and working), but simple and pragmatic alternatives are always top of mind. They jump out of windows, walk across moving cars, use household objects as weapons and drive cars down staircases.

Earlier this month, I presented a session on Finding Performance Bottlenecks with PowerShell at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2019 in Bellevue, Washington. The session seemed to be well received by the audience based on the feedback that I received from the attendees. The video from this presentation is now available The code and slides used during the demonstration can be found in my presentations repository on GitHub.

Words: 448 Time to read: ~ 2 minutes A while ago, I was asked about Automation and told a story about my friend James. In that story I talked about Constrained Endpoints and how, by using them, I could do a take the best bits of automation & delegation and not have to worry about … Continue reading "Updating the Account Password for my Constrained Endpoint"

In the early days of my career, I had the epiphany that “Best Practices” really do not exist or apply to most scenarios. It should be all driven by logic and common sense in the end. What makes much more sense is to find the standard /common practice compares to the mythological unicorn of “best … Continue reading "PowerShell: When and Where Writing Logs Matters"

Windows and reboots - more than a few candles have been burned on both ends in understanding and resolving this relationship. Like it or not and despite Microsoft’s efforts - Windows is the most rebootiest operating system around. There has to be a ton of code written around this - is it possible add a new contribution of real value? I think it is - by being concise around my specific context of software deployment automation for DevOps in the cloud with a brutal eye to compactness.

Do you want to know the secret to make a six-figure income in your job, or loving the job that you do? The secret is simple. It’s just giving a shit. The secret is just caring about what you do. Just Care I had a conversation with someone working on a help desk yesterday, and […] The post The Secret to a Six-Figure Income and Career Success appeared first on Adam the Automator - DevOps, Automation, PowerShell.

When working in an unfamiliar Active Directory environment with little or no documentation, knowing where things are (or where they are more likely to be) can help you get started a lot more quickly. And one question I always have is “where do you store your server objects in AD?” When approaching this problem, I... Continue reading →

I've been using PowerShell for a long while now using Hashtables, OrderedDictionary, and other types of data types in PowerShell, but I never paid attention to how powerful those are. And I don't mean your general knowledge about hashtables that is already covered by Kevin Marquette in his article Everything you wanted to know about Hashtables or my article PowerShell – Few tricks about HashTables and Arrays I wish I knew when I started.

Calling All PowerShell and DevOps Authors, Presenters, Bloggers, and Enthusiasts!The Call for Presenters (authors) is open for “The PowerShell Conference Book: Volume 2” until Friday May 31 at 11:00 PM EST. We are looking for one chapter per author on the topics of PowerShell and DevOps. All proceeds for the book will go to the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit OnRamp Scholarships.Those interested should submit a chapter abstract to the PSConfBook 2 CFP form at http://bit.

Overview Rambling Overview Winlogbeat What we care about Point to a pipeline and index Do some more client side processing Ingest pipelines What now? Rambling Whew! It’s been about 2 weeks since the 2019 PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit - the first conference I’ve played a role in organizing. It was super fun, and it was an honor to get a chance to help with content for the summit… that said, it’s been a nice two weeks of recovering! A lot of folks asked what I do nowadays! I gave my usual :headtilt: computers? response, but the gist of it is, while I still do quite a bit with PowerShell, I have a bunch of other building blocks to design solutions with! One of the more fun ones has been Elastic Stack.

Earlier this week, Chris Gardner presented a session on “Managing dependencies in PowerShell” for the Mississippi PowerShell User Group. I mentioned that I had written a function to retrieve PowerShell module dependencies that’s part of my ModuleBuildTools module. Get-MrAST is one of the primary functions that numerous other functions in the module are built on. It retrieves the AST from one or more PS1 and/or PSM1 files, script blocks, or random arbitrary code.

Few days ago I received a request to restore a dozen of tables because someone have deleted more data than it was supposed. I immediately thought about dbatools for the job! NOTE: I also thought about SSMS “Import/Export Data”. And this is ok when someone says “it’s to run just once, just now”. When you […]

Probably you had the need to script out some objects from a SQL Server instance/database and this is quite easy. You just need to right click on the object (well…not on every single one, try it with an Availability Group :-), no script option available) select “Script XXXX as” and you have it. But have […]

Creating Service Accounts is an especially tedious process when we need to create a lot of those for different purposes, mainly driven by the least privilege access across environments, projects, deployments or simply different clients.  So why don’t improve this? Let’s make it all more fun, efficient and less error-prone, so let’s automate it! Let’s … Continue readin