Monthly Archives: June 2013

Need for speed?

How fast does an admin script have to be? My opinion has always been that if its significantly faster than me doing the same task by hand then that’s more than fast enough. Is my time better spent developing new … Continue reading

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Using localhost

When creating functions that accept a computer name as a parameter you will often see this syntax param ( [string]$computername = ‘localhost’ ) This is designed to give a default value in the event of a value not being passed.  … Continue reading

Posted in Powershell Basics | Leave a comment

Refreshing values

The CIM cmdlets in PowerShell v3 enable you to refresh the data in the object.  Try this: $p = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfOS_Processor$p | Get-CimInstance | select percentprocessortime   $p will remain unchanged.  Another use for this is monitoring processes – … Continue reading

Posted in PowerShell and WMI | Leave a comment

PowerShell presentations

Jeffrey Snover and Jason Helmick will be presenting by webcast 18 July 9am – 5pm (PDT) on “Getting started with PowerShell” Details from http://powershell.org/wp/2013/06/27/a-special-presentation-on-getting-started-with-powershell/ A follow up day of presentations will occur in August delving further into scripting, automation and … Continue reading

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Writable properties for a WMI class

Do you know how to discover which properties on a WMI class, and therefore a WMI instance, can be modified? Get-CimClass from the PowerShell 3.0 CIM cmdlets is the answer: $class = Get-CimClass -ClassName win32_volume $class.CimClassProperties   The last command … Continue reading

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Automation tools?

In this post https://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/opinionautomate-or-suffer/ I talked about the need for admins to learn to automate. A couple of comments brought up the need for tools to create our automation scripts. I remember the 4th generation languages of the late 1980s … Continue reading

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Windows Management Framework 4.0 preview

The PowerShell 4.0 preview is now available.  It comes as part of WMF 4.0   Windows Management Framework 4.0 Preview includes updates to Windows PowerShell, Windows PowerShell ISE, Windows PowerShell Web Services (Management OData IIS Extension), Windows Remote Management (WinRM), … Continue reading

Posted in PowerShell v4 | Leave a comment

Dropping a database

A question came up on the forum regarding dropping a database & I realised it was something I hadn’t done before. SMO provides a set of classes for managing SQL Server. You get SMO when you install the SQL Server … Continue reading

Posted in PowerShell and SQL Server | Leave a comment

RDP annoyance

I’ve RDPing into a number of servers from different systems recently and the way the screen resolution changes to match your monitor size is annoying. If I use the shortcut to the session I get whatever sizes were set in … Continue reading

Posted in Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 | 1 Comment

Windows Server 2012 R2

The Windows Server 2012 R2 preview is available on MSDN subscriber downloads. It has PowerShell v4!!!!

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