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PowerShell for Admins
• Brian Bourque
PowerShell for Admins

Powershell IS for the desktop tech as well

Every day some one tends to ask me if there is a simpler way to do task A or B, and the minute I mention PowerShell the response is almost always the same, “yea i have been meaning to learn that but. This really saddens me for 2 reasons, Because PowerShell can and does make your life simpler i am already seeing peoples jobs get replaced when they fall behind in the skill and as more and more companies move closer to automation it will only get worse.

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• David Jones
PowerShell for Admins

Building a test lab : The basics Part 1 RootCA

Part of building a functional test lab is being able to deal with cattle and not pets. With that in mode I’m writing a series about the script necessary to build a production like lab for testing DSC, and be able to to tear it down and rebuild it with little effort. Part 1 is about bootstrapping DSC for the Root CA. and doing so without using plaintext passwords. I would welcome some feedback on both my methods and writing style.

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• pscookiemonster
PowerShell for Admins

RabbitMQ and PowerShell

Have you ever needed to communicate between scripts, perhaps running on different servers and in different languages? Did you use a non-standard “messaging” solution like the file system or a SQL database? Did you try to avoid this and squeeze everything into a monolithic, delicate script? RabbitMQ is a solid messaging solution that happens to have a handy REST API and .NET client, which means we can use PowerShell! Wrote a quick hit on setting up a simple RabbitMQ deployment and using PowerShell to manage the solution and send and receive messages.

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• pscookiemonster
PowerShell for Admins

Decorating PowerShell Objects

Ever wonder how PowerShell seems to know how to format objects? When you run Get-ChildItem or Get-WmiObject , you only see a few key properties, but a wealth of other information is available through commands like Select-Object and Get-Member . Have you ever written a PowerShell function that you nearly always pipe to Format-Table ? Wouldn’t it be nice to specify some default properties and force them into a table?

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• Mike F Robbins
PowerShell for Admins

Walkthrough: An example of how I write PowerShell functions

A couple of days ago I posted a blog article titled “PowerShell function: Test-ConsoleColor provides a visual demonstration of the foreach scripting construct” and today I thought I would walk you through that function step by step since it’s what I consider to be a well written PowerShell function. It starts out by using the #Requires statement to require at least PowerShell version 3 or it won’t run. It also requires that the PowerShell Community Extensions module be installed since it uses a function from that module and continuing without it only leads to errors:

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• Don Jones
PowerShell for Admins

Why Remoting vs. SSH Isn't Even a Thing

As you’ve probably read, Microsoft recently announced that they’re getting on board with SSH, and that they’ve plans to, in some future-and-unspecified version of Windows, include a default SSH server and client. Some folks have taken to the Twittersphere rejoicing this decision, even though I suspect they’ve no idea why Microsoft is doing it. Others have suggested that this is the downfall of Remoting (management via WS-MAN), because who would want that when you’ve got SSH?

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• pscookiemonster
PowerShell for Admins

Trust, but Verify

The PowerShell code you write can turn up in interesting places. Production services might rely on it. Your co-workers might take a peak and borrow ideas from it. You might decide to share it online. Someone might see your code online and use it in their own solutions. Hit the link for a quick bit on how we can help create more reliable, consistent, and secure solutions. Simplified to one line: always ask yourself “what could go wrong?

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• Don Jones
PowerShell for Admins

DON'T Start Learning PowerShell?!?!?

Jason Helmick and I were recently up in Redmond recording a Microsoft Virtual Academy series entitled, “Building Your Datacenter One DSC Resource at a Time.” While we were there, we decided to film a tongue-in-cheek promo for the series that started with the premise that, “if you haven’t already learned PowerShell, you missed the bus.” Obviously, there’s a bit more to the story.

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• David Jones
PowerShell for Admins

Creating a small footprint, base image Part 4 | Bringing it all together with automation

In this entry I combing all I covered into a set of scripts to automate the process of creating a small footprint VHDX base image and a WIM to use a sorce that is fully patched. And I added a script to update the files on a regular basis. Check it out and let me know what you think. Creating a small footprint, base image Part 4 | Bringing it all together with automation

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• Don Jones
PowerShell for Admins

Major Changes to DSC Pull Server Configuration IDs

Configuration IDs - Globally Unique Identifiers, or GUIDs, that DSC nodes use to identify themselves to a pull server - have always been a limiting factor in DSC design and architecture. In the April 2015 preview of WMF5, however, Microsoft has completely overhauled Configuration IDs. If you’re working with DSC, this is must-have information.

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