TIMTOWTDI (pronounced ‘tim-toady’) is the Perl dictum, “There is more than one way to do it.” PowerShell seems to be mercifully free of this, but this may be an exception. We leverage the old standard “Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration”...

Back in August 2012 , I posted about getting certificates bound to Office Communication Server 2007 interfaces using PSExec.  As much as I respect MarkRuss and SysInternals, PSExec is quite fiddly.  We have PSH V2 in our lab (finally!), so a...

Back in July 2011, I posted about getting the number of processors and cores and gave passing mention of the fact that there’s a known issue with PSH and some versions of Windows.  Well, PSH V3 now has the NumberOfLogicalProcessors property in the...

I seem to spend a lot of time typing about SSL certificates, don’t I?  Well, I seem to spend a lot of time auditing certificates at work.  In this case, we’re updating certs because we’re migrating from one Root CA to another.  Why? ...

I'm taking a break from PowerShell goodness to brag about my new MS Surface Pro. It's an amazing piece of engineering. It's small, it's light, it's ... It's very steal-able. Sadly, Microsoft (disclaimer: I work for them, but that's pretty much a...

RDCMan is a godsend if you have to jump on multiple machines. It's a wrapper for mstsc.exe, the venerable Remote Desktop Protocol client. It allows you to create trees of server groups (though groups and servers cannot branch from the same node, be warned...

$Env:PATH is a common bane - you have a hundred machines, and you end up with fifty different $Env:PATH values.  Here's a quick way to audit them, and to set them remotely.  But be careful: just like with superpowers, this comes with great responsibility...

This one is actually fun because it reminded me of my Comp Sci. 101 days (the actual course number was 53A, but the point is the same: basic algorithms.)  Here, I have an n -deep tree that I must consume leaf-first.  Specifically, I want to...

If I'm doing something long-running, and I want it to know when various lines of output are generated, assuming they are being sent to STDOUT (something PSH is NOT good at), here's a quick way to preface the output with a timestamp.

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Our lab maps hosts to KVM Ports based on, not hostname, not IP address, but the BIOS Serial Number. Like the last post, this is probably overkill on (Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $ComputerName Win32_BIOS).SerialNumber, but it's probably useful.  Possibly...

Let's say you have a list of hostnames and need IP addresses for them. "You have a list of hostnames..." Very funny.  This is probably overkill on what is simply [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostEntry($ComputerName).AddressList.  Still, it...

Here's a short one.  We want to know when this box was last rebooted.  Sure, it's in the SCOM DB, but this is probably faster. The Win32_OperatingSystem WMI object contains the LastBootupTime attribute.  Beyond that, it's a simple matter...

Thanks to my coworker Keith Munson for the core logic. This post is written around the task of removing SCOM and MOM monitoring agents, but those rely on knowing the agent’s MSI installer’s GUID. The easiest way to get that is to...

Here’s a quick spot-check on the memory usage on remote computer (or a few dozen computers).  It uses WMI objects – Win32_ComputerSystem for the TotalPhysicalMemory and Win32_OperatingSystem for FreePhysicalMemory, TotalVirtualMemorySize (why did...

Back in October of 2012, I posted Securely Storing a Password , which showed the key commands to capture a password and store it as a SecureString in a file. However, this doesn’t address using that password as a PSCredential. Let’s remedy...

Functions to converting Hashtables to PsCustomObjects and vice versa (losing all PsCustomObject class members that are not properties such as noteproperty).

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Querying the registry for installed programs remotely

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In PSH V2, Get-Content –Tail 10 –Wait will display the last 10 lines of a file, then poll it every second and display any additions to it.  In PSH V1, Get-Content didn’t have a –Tail flag, so if you wanted to do the equivalent of the Unix tail(1...

With an endless stream of daily builds, it is essential that a test lab run the latest version.  PS C:\Users\timdunn> dir C:\Windows\System32\*.dll | Get-FileVersion | more Path                                                       ...

When it comes time to rolling SSL certificates on web servers, nothing beats checking the server to see what is actually being served.

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To start with, a disclaimer: I’m not a SQL person.  No, not at all.  I just find myself supporting services that use MSSQL as a backend.  Here are a few functions I’ve recently written to help keep my sanity.

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How many times have you gotten a WMI-Object and had to scroll through screens of null values? Here's a quick way to generate a new PSCustomObject that has those values removed. Note that this is NOT the same object type as the input object, and it does...

We've seen the Select-Object synthetic property method and the Add-Member -name AddNoteProperty method, but here's probably the most straightforward way to output object data. $object = $true | Select ComputerName, Path, ContentCount; $object.ComputerName...

Here's the scenario: You have a script that needs to access a static password which has to be stored in a file, but you do not want the password readable. Here is a way to encrypt the password so that only you can read it. Anyone else running the same...

Sorry, no code here. Just a quick thought. Q: Why should I put semi-colons at the end of lines? PowerShell is smart enough to parse EOL as command terminators. A: Because some blogs are stupid and strip linefeeds. That means you get a single line...