So, after our nearly-2-day outage, which was due to a still-not-fully-explained Apache fail, we’re looking to make some changes. We need to migrate PowerShell.org to a different Azure subscription anyway, so this is a good time to change the kind of service we’re using. First, using Azure is non-negotiable. If your expert opinion is to use something else, please just don’t ;). **Update: **This might be changing. AWS could be an option. Second, our current environment is a classic VM running CentOS 6 (yeah, it’s old), WordPress, and MySQL. WordPress and MySQL are also non-negotiable, this isn’t about switching CMSs or anything. We use VaultPress for to-the-minute backups, but their restore process is a beast and has never been easy or reliable. What we WANT is the ability to more or less push a button and re-deploy the entire site from backup, ideally automated through some OMS trigger that senses when the site has crashed. Now, some caveats.
Due to unforeseen circumstances we’re a bit late getting out notifications of the sessions accepted for the 2017 Summit. Apologies to everyone who submitted sessions. We hope to have the notifications out in the next few days
The deadline for the submission of proposals for the 2017 has passed. We are NOT taking any new submissions. if you’ve been in communication regarding a submission thats fine its still under consideration and I’ll be in touch.
With Ignite fast-approaching, here’s what’s up - and this is intended to be a “community post,” meaning I’d love it if you could add your own PowerShell At Ignite notes in the comments, including sessions you’re looking forward to! On **Sunday evening, **while not officially a PowerShell event, a lot of PowerShell glitterati will be at The Krewe’s annual gathering from 8pm. On **Monday evening, **the Atlanta PowerShell User Group is kindly hosting a meet-and-greet with myself, Jeff Hicks, and Jason Helmick. We promise to be educational; registration required (but free). Tuesday evening is the PowerShell Community Happy Hour (from 4-7; tickets required), including many of the in-attendance team members, most of the PowerShell.org Board, and a bunch of super Shell enthusiasts. We’ll have PowerShell.org and The DevOps Collective laptop stickers! **Wednesday, **I’m looking forward to PowerShell Unplugged with Jeffrey Snover and I, from 9 to 9:45am. This is nearly always hilarious and fun. Then, from 10-10:30, Jeffrey, Jason Helmick, and I will be signing books and handing out laptop stickers at the Ignite Bookstore. Finally, from 11-11:30, I’ll be signing FREE! books at the Conversational Geek booth (#571) (who have some amazing scavenger hunt prizes). And of course, please stop by the Pluralsight booth to say hi, pick up some swag, register your company for a free pilot subscription, and whatnot. So… what’re YOU looking forward to next week?
It’s a bit of a sad day at The DevOps Collective, which is the nonprofit that runs PowerShell.org. One of our Board of Directors members, Dave Wyatt, will be stepping down from his Director position this week. He wants to focus on his personal life a bit more, although he’s still going to be responsible for our public Build Service, and he’s going to continue contributing to the Pester project, so the community isn’t losing him entirely. Dave’s been a huge help, and a huge inspiration, at PowerShell.org, and he’ll be greatly missed. But our sadness is balanced by some happy news, too, as PowerShell.org Webmaster Will Anderson has agreed to fill Dave’s seat. Will has brought a great enthusiasm to our team of volunteers, is also a PowerShell MVP, and also resides in Canada. Will’s responsible for most of the photography you’ll see in the upcoming PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017 brochure, and he’s been a great help in keeping PowerShell.org’s website up and running. So please join me in wishing our outgoing Director all the best, and in welcoming Will to the Board!
For those of you that have been at PowerShell Summits over the last few years you’ll have heard Jeffrey Snover state that he wanted to take PowerShell to other platforms.
Now its happened
Jeffrey has announced that an ALPHA release of PowerShell is now available for Linux and Mac. Currently available for Ubuntu, Centos, Red Hat and Mac OS X with more to come
The PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit is the number one conference where PowerShell enthusiasts gather and learn from each other in fast-paced, knowledge packed presentations. PowerShell, and DevOps, experts from all over the world including MVP’s, community leaders and PowerShell team members, will once again join together for a few days in Bellevue, WA. to discuss and learn about maximizing PowerShell in the workplace.
It’s also the place to explore and further your knowledge of DevOps principles and practices in a Windows environment. It’s a place to make new connections, learn new techniques, and offer something to your peers and colleagues. If you want to share your PowerShell or DevOps expertise, then this is your official call to submit presentations for selection!
We’ve been making a ton of improvements at PowerShell.org… if you haven’t visited in a while, it might be worth a stop by. **First, **if you’re hitting any of the links below and getting a 404, the most common culprit seems to be an over-zealous corporate proxy cache. Try clearing it, or doing a Shift+Reload in your browser. Confirm by visiting from a non-proxied network, like at home. Our eBooks page has a bunch of new content, and our books are now available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB from two providers (LeanPub and GitBook). You can also read books online in HTML. Site members now have an extensive profile that you can complete, and doing so is one step on our short Welcome Aboard! mission that will earn you a new “Welcome!” badge on the site. It’s one of many new achievements you can earn for participating in the community in a variety of ways. And have you seen our new videos? In addition to tons of YouTube videos that include workshops, tutorials, and Summit recordings, we also have started new short-subject, structured learning series - entire courses that even award a certificate of completion when you’re done! But there’s much more we can do to help you connect with community, so we’re taking a quick survey. Here’s some of what we can enable:
I’d appreciate your help in testing HTTPS/SSL here on PowerShell.org. Right now, it’s “voluntary,” meaning you have to explicitly ask for https://powershell.org. If you have any problems, please note them in a comment on this article. Some notes and known problems:
Most pages will not show the “lock” address bar icon in your browser, because we’re delivering mixed content. For example, the site logo is being hardcoded as http:// by some Javascript in our theme, which I need to sort out.
Your connection will be to CloudFlare, which is who issued the certificate you’ll see. We’ve also SSL’d the traffic between them and our server using a DigiCert SSL certificate. We’re also going to enable client certificate authentication, so our server will only deliver content to CloudFlare, which then delivers it to you. That’s ahead.
I think we can solve the mixed-content problem by forcing HTTPS, which is easy, but I want to make sure it’s otherwise working before taking that step. We already have a WordPress plugin in place that’s rewriting http:// or https:// with just // in URLs, but there’re a couple of places where that plugin isn’t able to help, and that’s why we’re delivering mixed content still. I’ll point out that this is mainly a bonus-points project; because almost everyone logs into the site using an external account, we don’t store many passwords (and thus don’t transmit them in the clear or otherwise). We don’t store or transmit any other personally identifiable information. Still, SSL has some other benefits, and it shouldn’t hurt to have it on, so we’re giving it a shot. Thanks!
Putting on an event like the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit involves a lot of planning. We started the planning process for the 2017 Summit BEFORE the 2016 Summit started!
We have to work so far in advance that we’re taking guesses at the topics that will be of high interest next April – remember that we fix the agenda 6 months before the actual Summit.
Part of the process of creating the agenda is that we publish a ‘Call for Proposals’ where we ask potential speakers to submit session proposals. We then use those proposals as the basis of the agenda. Session proposals can be taken as they are or we may suggest changes to the speaker to ensure a more cohesive agenda.
