Tuesday, October 28, 2014

How To: Scripts for AutoDiscover, EWS, IIS, OAB and RCA Stats #MSExchange


How To: Scripts for AutoDiscover, EWS, IIS, OAB and RCA Stats #MSExchange


A ton of great scripts from RCA to IIS autodiscovery.

 

PowerShell: Search all Event Logs Within a Specific Time Frame


PowerShell: Search all Event Logs Within a Specific Time Frame


A very nice script to targeting a date range for pulling event logs.
 

Desired State Configuration (DSC) Using Operations Manager to check for configuration enforcement


Desired State Configuration (DSC) Nodes Deployment and Conformance Reporting Series (Part 4): Using Operations Manager to check for configuration enforcement


A detailed post on how to use Operations Manager with DSC to drive your deployments.

PowerShell DSC scripts from AuTechEd


PowerShell DSC scripts from AuTechEd


A few DSC scripts to add to your PowerShell library.

Set GPO Status with PowerShell


Set GPO Status with PowerShell


A very extensive script that will help you remember all the options for setting GPO statuses.

Creating Random Demo Users in Active Directory using PowerShell


Creating Fake AD Users


 This is a short and useful script for creating fake AD users, useful in testing.


Saturday, August 16, 2014

Four Recent Microsoft KB patches Can Crash or Corrupt Your Computer


Microsoft recently announced (Mid August 2014) that some of the recent KB patches released to the public are causing corruption and crashes of many computers.

The most serious KB is KB2982791

MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014


The other three KBs are:

  • KB2970228
  • KB2975719
  • KB2975331

I have posted the following PowerShell script to help you quickly identify if your computer has any of these four KBs installed.

If you do have any of these four KBs installed, please read the mitigations steps listed in the KB articles.

Tip: You might want to create a restore point before removing the KBs, as a fall back just in case…



Here is what my output looks like:


It appears I have to uninstall KB2982791 !!

Here is an article from ZDNET on the situation:

Microsoft pulls updates, recommends uninstall


I borrowed the script from ScriptingGuy Ed Wilson and made a few changes.

Use PowerShell to Easily Find Information About Hotfixes


If you have many servers to check, you can always get a list of servers from a text / CSV file and add the ComputerName parameter.


Monday, August 11, 2014

DSC Bucked Me Off and I Regrouped



PowerShell DSC Tip


At times DSC can be like trying to rein in a wild bronco, learning how to control it, without it getting skittish. 
I recently wasted a ton of man hours when I tried creating a new DSC resource.

Every time I made a change to the resource in an iterative cycle, I had some simple tests that failed over and over.

I triple checked the code, and tried everything short of reinstalling PowerShell.

TIP: Unless you tell DSC otherwise, it will cache your resource when you run it, for speed purposes. This means when you modify the resource, it does not "take" unless you get DSC to reload the cache. To do that, you turn off the caching by using DebugMode in the LocalConfigurationManager.

Debug Mode in Desired State Configuration


LocalConfigurationManager{ DebugMode = $true }



Wednesday, July 16, 2014

How to deploy Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 into an Azure VM using PowerShell




Title
How to deploy Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 into an Azure VM using PowerShell
Subtitle
Automated deployment using PowerShell and Azure
Keywords
Visual Studio "14", CTP 2, PowerShell , VM, Azure
Category
PowerShell
Audience
Azure subscribers that want to review Visual Studio "14" CTP 2
Purpose
This script will automate the deploying of Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 to an Azure VM so that you can review this new release without clobbering existing installed programs.
Credits
Thanks to Michael Collier for his original blog post on this.
Links

Summary
Quickly get a working copy of VS 14 CTP 2 running in Azure VM.
Notes
This script can easily be changed to install any Azure VM in the Azure Gallery.
Prerequisites
Building a VM in Windows Azure using PowerShell in a few quick steps


PS Code Image