Dec 01 2014
If you found this post via a search engine, you’ve likely received a ticket/request from some manager requesting an audit report of the permissions on an important share within your company. Unfortunately for you, this folder contains literally tens of thousands of folders and hundreds of thousands of files. Oh and since there has been …
Nov 23 2014
You guys are in for a treat today. Have you ever attempted to troubleshoot an issue with an Active Directory user only to find yourself in ADSI edit trying to figure out if any attributes are not configured correctly? Since you’re often not sure what the value is supposed to be, you’d like to compare …
Nov 22 2014
In PowerShell, you will constantly find yourself iterating through collections of data. Perhaps you have a list of users or folders to process. Often what ends up happening is you will obtain this data through some other cmdlet. Perhaps Get-ADUser or Get-ChildItem. This works well but what happens if you’re testing and you only want …
Nov 22 2014
I find myself constantly in a situation where I have a giant list of data and I need to know which entries in that data occur most frequently. I’ve always used Excel pivot tables for this purpose. Recently someone saw me solve a problem using this technique and they were very surprised and wished they’d …
Nov 21 2014
Today I had a need to compare the local security policies between two domain controllers to verify the audit configuration on each. I figured this could be easily achieved using the Security Configuration and Analysis MMC built into Windows. The tool seems to work well with comparing with pre-defined baselines but for the life of me …
Nov 21 2014
Consider the following scenario. You run a command in PowerShell. It fails. It generates tons of scary red text. You don’t like this. You want to display a more friendly error message. Or better still, you want to take some action based on the error. With PowerShell, you can do this easily with something called …
Nov 15 2014
I make use of custom objects constantly in PowerShell. Having the ability to easily combine and present data is incredibly powerful. Since I use them so much, I’ve found myself wanting to make them as fast and easy as possible to create. After much research and experimentation, I think I have created one of the …
Nov 05 2014
Have you ever found one of your domain controllers pinned at 100% CPU with lsass.exe using up 99% of it? Have you been baffled at how to figure out what to do next and how to figure out who and what is causing it? Thankfully Microsoft has created a tool to help aid us in …
Oct 31 2014
I had a conversation with a coworker today where he expressed an interest in learning PowerShell. He knew it was critical to his future in IT and could help him solve many day to day challenges but felt that it was too intimidating and didn’t know where to begin. I decided I would do my …
Oct 13 2014
Microsoft has released released a technical preview of its upcoming consumer desktop operating system Windows 10. Anyone can download it (amazingly, you don’t even need to sign in or sign up for anything to grab it!) from here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-iso I’ve been playing with it for a few minutes now and already I’ve noticed something fundamentally …
