One of the critical parts of Active Directory is DFS. It allows you to share same NETLOGON/SYSVOL folders across all Domain Controllers in your Forest. Its health is vital to the functionality of your Active Directory. If it's broken, a lot of things may not work, and it's not that easy to tell the status of it. At first sight, everything may seem to work correctly, but if you take a closer look - not so much.

Some time ago I wrote a blog about monitoring SMART status with CrystalDiskInfo. After bringing this script over to our production RMM environment everything seemed good. But when I looked a little deeper I found that the script failed on NVME drives. NVME drives handle SMART-Status different from ‘regular’ SATA drives. This started me on […] The post Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring SMART status using SmartCTL.

I've been in IT for a longer time now. I've made my fair share of mistakes and misconfigurations. One of those misconfigurations was removing Authenticated Users from Security filtering in Group Policy Objects. While it worked fine at some point Microsoft rolled out a Hotfix MS16-07 on June 14th 2016. The post Finding GPOs missing permissions that may prevent GPOs from working correctly appeared first on Evotec.

Learn, hands-on, how to work with PowerShell code in Azure DevOps pipelines in this ultimate guide!

As I mentioned in a previous blog article, the AzureRM PowerShell module is only supported until December of 2020. It has been replaced by the Az PowerShell module which was introduced in December of 2018. On Twitter, I recently asked if anyone was still using the AzureRM module and what was keeping them from transitioning to the Az module. One of the responses I received was due to the amount of work and time invested in scripts based on the AzureRM module.

I have been an IT Pro for almost 30 years. For the most part that has meant working in a Microsoft Windows environment. I remember dabbling with Linux when it first hit the scene. I found it intriguing but never had a need to really learn and use it. Over the years, I’ve continued to...

Understand how PowerShell scripts work in Azure DevOps pipelines and learn how to run them in this informative tutorial.

This post started at PowerShell.org (direct link). It’s Nearly the PowerShell PSBlogWeek. 2020. Continued. At a time like this, I can’t help but think back to 2006 and the introduction of PowerShell 1.0. Back then, I loved Visual Basic Script (VBS). It’s been less embarrassing to admit that over the years, as I’ve put it […] The post It’s Nearly the PowerShell PSBlogWeek. 2020. appeared first on tommymaynard.

It seems like I’m having a week of requests. This one was requested by my friends at Datto. One of their clients wanted to have the ability to run speed-tests and have their RMM system generate alerts whenever the speed drops. I’ve made the following PowerShell script that uses the CLI utility from speedtest.net. This […] The post Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring internet speeds appeared first on CyberDrain.

The post Renaming NETBIOS name of Active Directory Error appeared first on Evotec.

WSL or Windows Subsystem for Linux, is a feature that let us run full Linux distributions on top of our Windows OS without the overhead of running a virtualization tools. The post Install PowerShell 7 On WSL and Ubuntu appeared first on Saggie Haim.

Today’s post is definitely on the fun side. In fact, I apologize in advance for the afternoon you are about to blow playing with this code. Those of you of a certain age will recall dial up modems and bulletin boards. Part of the experience was visual. Board operators often displayed the name of their...

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

I’ve been super swamped the last couple of days, as we’re working on our ISO27001 audit in our office. This means most of my time is just being swallowed by auditors. I’ve decided to not break my streak in releasing my blogs on time so this time we’re covering some requests from our readers! Monitoring […] The post Monitoring with PowerShell: WAN IP changes and Active Directory ages appeared first on CyberDrain.

Earlier this week I shared my techniques for creating a Windows Terminal profile that would open a remote PowerShell session. But with PowerShell 7, I can also connect to non-Windows machines using SSH. So why not extend my code to allow connecting to a Linux box? Before you try anything that I’m going to share,...

Want to learn GitHub Actions? Get step-by-step instructions in this real-world tutorial using Terraform!

Monitoring is an important activity in IT operations, it’s essential for correlating the state of all the moving parts of our systems and applications and create a big picture of the health of the whole environment.  Before going down the rabbit hole of complicated monitoring tools and techniques let’s start with define a that monitoring … Continue reading "Monitoring the Network

The idea of this blog post, like many others I write, is to document a workaround solution to my problem. Hopefully I can also help someone that may be looking for the solution for this problem and stumbles accidentally (or not) on my blog. Scenario I was helping a colleague automating the creation of emails […]

Learn how to apply DSC configurations using the Azure DSC extension in ARM templates in this step-by-step tutorial.

In this article, I am going to tell you about my speaker and community engagements for 2020. I also plan to update the article after each conference with some pictures as well as tell you about how my experience was. Nordic Infrastructure Conference Nordic Infrastructure Conference was arranged for the 9th year in Oslo, Norway - February 6th - 7th, 2020. For several years the conference has brought both international and local speakers to Norway, sharing their knowledge and experience with the attendees.

Words: 557 Time to read: ~ 3 minutes T-SQL Tuesday has come back around! Another month without me getting a separate blog post out. I’ll get a non-T-SQL Tuesday blog post out eventually! This month, Jess Pomfret ( twitter | blog ) asks us about our life hacks. The Humble Tomato There is not enough … Continue reading "T-SQL Tuesday #123: Life hacks to make your day easier"

In Part 15 of this series we’ll continue our journey with Ansible, Windows and PowerShell and look at how to install software packages via Chocolatey. In this example we’ll demonstrate how to install Visual Studio Code and PowerShell 7.0 Preview using the win_chocolatey Ansible module. This module will first of all install chocolatey if it … Continue reading Ansible, Windows and

Learn how to manage Microsoft Exchange Online mailbox databases using PowerShell and eseutil in this tutorial.

When I learned PowerShell and discovered the Try/Catch/Finally statements I was immediately puzzled by the usefulness of the Finally statement and I never found its real functional purpose clearly documented somewhere...

I have jumped in the deep end and fully committed to Windows Terminal as my default PowerShell environment. I love having one interface with tabs for different terminal profiles. Windows Terminal makes it easy for me to have tabs open to PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, an Ubuntu instance or even a PowerShell session with no...

The Az PowerShell module was released in December of 2018 and is now the recommended module for managing Microsoft Azure. AzureRM is the previous PowerShell module for managing Azure which has been deprecated but will continue to be supported until December of 2020. Windows PowerShell 5.1, PowerShell Core 6, PowerShell 7, and higher are supported by the Az PowerShell module. Windows 10 version 1607 and higher has Windows PowerShell 5.

A bunch of bad actors these days uses the great psexec tool by Sysinternals/Microsoft to try to move through the network latterly. PSExec allows you to remotely execute commands on different computers through a very simple command line interface. PSexec also allows you to execute commands or scripts as the SYSTEM account. We use PSExec […] The post Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring psexec execution appeared first on CyberDrain.

This post started at PowerShell.org. Be sure to read the beginning of the article. Forum Problem to Posted Solution and Article Post, Continued I was reading the Stack Overflow (PowerShell) forum when I happened on a question that I decided I would take on. It reminded me of an old post I had written. In that post, […] The post Forum Problem to Posted Solution and Article Post appeared first on tommymaynard.

If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you may have seen a PSBlogWeek event in the past. This is an online event with a coordinated set of blog posts from a group of bloggers and community members all centered on a given topic. This idea is to share a lot of information on a...

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

Data Science folk used Notebooks for documentation and to show re-runnable research. Azure Data Studio included this notebook functionality and added SQL kernel where with a little bit of faffing you could run PowerShell and then a Python kernel that enabled PowerShell. It seems that notebooks are so cool that everyone is creating them these […]

During my last post we talked about GPO in an Active Directory domain, today we will move on to concrete things create an managed GPO with PowerShell 1. Powershell Module And yes there is a powershell module for GPOs and nothing easier to list the commands ;-) Get-Command -Module GroupPolicy...

Learn how to publish Azure Artifacts NuGet packages automatically with Azure Pipelines in this step-by-step tutorial!

For many Windows-oriented IT Pros, and I used to be one of them, regular expressions was an arcane topic that was too hard to learn. And we never really had a compelling need to learn because we were busy clicky-clicking everything. Then came PowerShell and we discovered, or maybe rediscovered, a whole new way to...

Learn how to use PowerShell Import-Csv to foreach loop your way to scripting success! Tons of examples in this tutorial.

Recently, I have been doing a lot of Microsoft Intune deployments and write up’s. One of the most time-consuming tasks with Intune is the application portion, where you package applications up to deploy to your end-user machines. Currently, if the application is bundled as an executable (exe), the steps to get it into Intune is as follows: Grab the installation executable Find the install switches – most common one is the silent switch, but some applications may have other switches you will need as well Find the install directory or registry key to tell Intune if it installed correctly or not Find the uninstall executable and any switches it has as well Wrap the executable in an ‘INTUNEWIN’ format Import file into Intune Configure the application with the install and uninstall switches as well as the directory it creates to Intune knows if it installed correctly or not This process … Continue.

In Part 14 of this series we’ll continue our journey with Ansible, Windows and PowerShell and look at how to handle registry entries in Windows. In this example we’ll look at how to both create a new registry entry and update an existing registry entry using the win_regedit Ansible module. Our current view of registry … Continue reading Ansible, Windows and PowerShell: the Basics

Learn how to take your PowerShell scripts to the next level by building an automated Azure DevOps pipeline around it!

Microsoft advises to keep a “breakglass” account for environments in case of a major cell malfunction or other emergency situations. Our worry about these accounts has always been how to check if they have not been compromised or even used in anyway. I’ve created the following two scripts for this. These scripts are for two […] The post Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring O365 / Azure Breakglass account logon.

Azure Key Vault is to secure the secrets safely and access them securely as needed without hard-coding them in our code to authenticate to variousContinue reading

There are some actions that we know that will have to be repeated from time to time, but the surprise comes when it’s time to do so and the process that used to work does not work anymore. This is a short post to document a slight change that I had to do to achieve […]

This post started at PowerShell.org. Be sure to read the beginning of the article. Fake the Data when Missing the CSV, Continued We’re, mostly, going to start with the code. In this first example you’ll have to believe me that the file IPs.csv does in fact exist, and it contains two columns. One is the host […] The post Fake the Data when Missing the CSV appeared first on tommymaynard.

We use tab to navigate through the available CmdLets, parameters, parameter values and files or folders in a given path, but to list all ofContinue reading

Olá Pessoal, Hoje vamos ver uma maneira mais pratica para conseguir o AccessToken para autenticar chamadas REST a partir de uma sessão do modulo Az para […] O post Obtendo o Token de autenticação para chamadas REST no Azure de forma simplificada apareceu primeiro em Guido Oliveira.

Almost all of my clients currently are running Office365 and AzureAD in some shape or form. I like having the ability to look at what exactly is going on in their Azure AD environment. Previously we’ve talked about documenting the office365 side. Today we’re going to be using the Azure AD module to create documentation […] The post Documenting with PowerShell: Documenting Azure AD Settings appeared first on CyberDrain.

Olá pessoal, Hoje vamos ver  como gerar certificados digitais auto assinados para assinar digitalmente scripts powershell, que é uma boa pratica. Quando executamos scripts no pwoershell, […] O post Gerando Certificados para assinar digitalmente seus scripts apareceu primeiro em Guido Oliveira.

Time is a constraint I haven’t posted anything recently, mainly due to too many things happening. In 2019 I’ve been to 2 conferences and 7 meetups as a speaker. I’ve presented some of my recent work at THE GREATEST conference - PSConf 2019 and Best Spent Day with PowerShell at PSDayUK. If you’re interested, all my slides and code are available on GitHub. I’ve also had the pleasure to write a chapter for PSConfBook volume 2.

Some of you may be aware of my PSCalendar module which you can install from the PowerShell Gallery. The module contains commands that you can use to display a console-based calendar.  The calendar commands let you specify days to highlight. These might be days with special events or appointments. I typically use the Show-Calendar command...

Einfaches Beispiel: Der IT-Administrator hat einen weiteren Mitarbeiter, der aber im ActiveDirectory nicht alle Rechte bekommen soll. In meinem Fall soll dieser Mitarbeiter Benutzer in Gruppen aufnehmen und Passwörter zurücksetzen können. Wie kann dies erreicht werden? Der Beitrag FirstWare DynamicGroup – Teil 2: Delegation Mode erschien zuerst auf it-koehler-blog.

Zunächst eine kleine Funktionsbeschreibung von "DynamicGroup". Wie es der Name schon vermuten lässt, handelt es sich um eine Software welche dynamisch Gruppenzugehörigkeiten erstellen kann Der Beitrag FirstWare DynamicGroup – Teil 1: ein kleines Tutorial erschien zuerst auf it-koehler-blog.