In a domain environment auto enrollment can be used to get create unique certificates for each node that can be used with DSC. The problem is getting the public cert to the machine that creates the DSC MOF files. I wrote a module last year to collect them directly form the Enterprise CA. If it interests you take a look https://blog.bladefirelight.com/nuggets/collecting-ca-certificates-for-dsc-configuration/
PowerShell provides a tremendous boon to productivity for computer professionals of all types. But, you have to admit: it can be a bit daunting to get up to speed! Indeed, as someone who has a fair amount of experience using it, I still find myself having to look up how to do things–frequently. So I started keeping track of the recipes I was using the most. And came up with a list of 400 or so, published in 4 parts.
Once upon a time, there was this woman at a TechMentor conference a few years ago, sitting in the front of the room during the “Don and Jason" show, a not-quite-scripted discussion on various “lightning” topics.
The topic at that moment was DevOps, and this woman was asking for advice on being an advocate for DevOps in her company.
Her company had just been acquired, she explained, which meant that the atmosphere was ripe for change, but the culture of the company they had been acquired from was very change-resistant.
I have written a short excerpt on how to pass parameters from an object to a Pester test. I have turned this into a function: Invoke-POVTest.
The function is primarily for operational validation tests, where you might have a single operational test but you need to test multiple cases. (Sorry, I am not quite sure if I described it properly).
I’ll be interested in any feedback.
Link to blog post here.
If you haven’t taken a look at Tug, now’s a great time. Eugene Bekker has been doing a ton of heavy lifting, taking my .NET Core proof-of-concept code and turning it into a formal ASP.NET MVC project.
I’ve listened to a few of my Windows-friendly compatriots attempting to explain PowerShell to their Linux colleagues, and it hasn’t always gone well. The problem, I think, is that a lot of Windows folks don’t actually know why PowerShell exists in the first place. Let me explain.
You can certainly find a number of articles around that present PowerShell pitfalls that can easily trip you up if you are not careful. I took a different approach in my three-part series, A Plethora of PowerShell Pitfalls.
The first two parts are presented in quiz format, together covering the top 10 “gotchas”. They will help you test your awareness to see if you even realized the danger and did not know you’ve been skirting those traps for awhile.
I had a wonderful conversation with some team members around Windows Containers generally, and they had some very cool analogies that I don’t think have been publicized enough. There’s some good technical detail, too, which I think is worth understanding as we move into this brave new world of containerization.
Pipelining is an important concept in PowerShell. Though the idea did not originate with PowerShell (you can find it used decades earlier in Unix, for example), PowerShell does provide the unique advantage of being able to pipeline not just text, but first-class .NET objects.
Pipelining has several advantages:
It helps to conserve memory resources. Say you want to modify text in a huge file. Without a pipeline you might read the huge file into memory, modify the appropriate lines, and write the file back out to disk.
A discussion in one of my Slack channels caught my eye today around someone’s reflections in a github repo regarding DSC. The posted comment that introduced the link was titled “DSC from a newbie perspective”, and I thought “Oh? I’m a newbie too, I wonder if we’re thinking the same things.”
A little history is probably needed on my “newbie” status with DSC. I went to the Tech Mentor conference in March, where I spent most of my time in sessions learning DSC.