Monthly Archives: July 2015

Windows 10

Posted on Wednesday 29 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

Went through the Windows 10 upgrade procedure this morning. Fairly quick process – just over the hour including download on a slow broadband link. Most of my settings from Windows 8.1 were saved. So far impressions are reasonable to good. … Continue reading →

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PowerShell Summit NA 2016–call for topics warning

Posted on Tuesday 28 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

A conference organiser’s work is never done. The dust has just settled from PowerShell Summit NA 2015 and we’re gearing up for PowerShell Europe 2015. We also need to start thinking about PowerShell NA 2016! A post on powershell.org http://powershell.org/wp/2015/07/28/powershell-summit-na-2016-call-for-topics-coming-soon/ … Continue reading →

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WMI dates

Posted on Tuesday 28 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

Dates as reported by WMI still seem to cause a lot of problems. If you use the WMI cmdlets £> Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem | select *date* | fl InstallDate   : 20131205101649.000000+000LocalDateTime : 20150728121320.002000+060   That format is year, month, day, … Continue reading →

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Self signed certificates for testing

Posted on Saturday 25 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

A question on the forum http://powershell.org/wp/forums/topic/cannot-add-digital-signature-to-my-script/#post-27883 indicated a problem when using a self signed certificate for testing code signing. According to the about_signing help file CREATE A SELF-SIGNED CERTIFICATE ——————————–    To create a self-signed certificate in use the New-SelfSignedCertificate    cmdlet … Continue reading →

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Devops Tools

Posted on Thursday 23 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

DevOps is the fusion of development and operations practices to give you faster, more reliable, roll out of functionality to your organisation.  Its a growing area and while much of DevOps practice is cultural rather than technical you will need … Continue reading →

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PowerShell documentation and more

Posted on Wednesday 22 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

PowerShell has a new home.  This site on MSDN https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell is the centre for Microsoft’s PowerShell documentation. Book mark it now!

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Using parameters instead of read-host when getting AD replication data

Posted on Wednesday 22 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

I’ve seen a lot of scripts recently that use Read-Host to get input data.  This is generally not best practice – I tend to only use Read-Host if I want to get a password and obscure the text on screen. … Continue reading →

Posted in PowerShell and Active Directory, Powershell Basics | Leave a comment

Data for comparisons

Posted on Tuesday 21 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

A question on the forum asked about storing data used in comparisons, The example was based on a list if IP addresses where some were known to be good and the questioner wanted to filter out the known good ones … Continue reading →

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Input validation on multiple regex

Posted on Monday 20 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

One of the things I like about writing advanced functions is the ability to validate the input. if you test the input immediately you can  often stop mistakes being made. Mistakes that could damage your system! One of the validation … Continue reading →

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get-computerDN–dealing with non-existant computers

Posted on Friday 17 July 2015 by richardsiddaway

If you look at the working part of the code to discover the distinguished name of a computer: £> $computer = ‘w12r2sus’£> $filter = “(&(objectCategory=computer)(objectClass=computer)(cn=$computer))”£> ([adsisearcher]$filter).FindOne().Properties.distinguishednameCN=W12R2SUS,OU=Servers,DC=Manticore,DC=org What happens if the computername you chose doesn’t exist? £> $computer = ‘w12r2nope’£> $filter … Continue reading →

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