Pure Capsaicin at Spiceworks!
Under The Stairs
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3w ago
As many readers know, I've regularly contributed to the Spiceworks online community (www.spiceworks.com/comunity) for a long time. As well as contributing I've been a moderator for several forums, including the PowerShell (obviously), Windows, Virtualisation, Azure, and of course DNS. I first joined in August of 1972, found it was fun to contribute (and it was a great place to help IT Pros to get the most out of PowerShell. I've been contributing ever since! Contributors get points for doing things withing the comunity, such as posting a new question (10 points), authoring articles that a ..read more
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Having Fun with Get-Content
Under The Stairs
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1y ago
Most IT Pros know and use the Get-Content to get the contents of a file into a variable/array. You can then process the array to do useful things. I use this cmdlet a lot - in my last book (which has 111 total scripts), I used the cmdlet in over 15|% of the scripts. Most usage cases involve relatively small files, but sometimes the files can get quite big. And when you import large files, you find that Get-Content is slow. There are a couple of reasons for this blog post shows. One important reason is that Get-Content uses a PowerShell provider - but there is more! As it turns out, you can't ..read more
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My Latest (last?) PowerShell Book is published!
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1y ago
This week I got the news that my latest PowerShell book has been published and is available for order: You can order it today from all the usual places, including https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Server-Automation-PowerShell-Cookbook/dp/1804614238. This book updates earlier editions and covers, specifically, PowerShell 7.2 (as an LTS release) and Windows Server 2022. It should also be useful if you are using PowerShell 7 on earlier versions of Windows Server too.  Here is the table of contents: Installing and Configuring PowerShell 7 Managing PowerShell 7 in the Enterprise Ex ..read more
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More Hyper-V Troubleshooting Woes - but a script to help
Under The Stairs
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1y ago
In a previous post, I noted some challenges I faced with Hyper-V. The TL;DR is that Windows Update breaks Hyper-V, often as a result of a new WIndows Insider Build. In that post I explained the basic fix for this issue.  Jeffrey Snover once pointed out that when Linux guys are faced with an issue for a second time - they create a script. Well - I am now facing this Hyper-V problem more frequently. The root issue is that an Update can break Hyper-V. The solution is to re-create the VMs. Which can be a lot of work. As I recovered from the previous failure, I started to write a script to so ..read more
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Fun and Games with Hyper-V in Windows 11
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2y ago
 I love Hyper-V inside Windows 11 (and inside Windows 8.x and 10 in their day). An utterly simple hypervisor (to use) but one that provides a lot of benefits. I have written 4, and shortly 5, books that made use of this feature. I have created a nice server farm (2 forests, 3 domains, multiple servers, etc) which runs nicely on my boxes. The scripts to create the VMs, and configure them are all published to GitHub,.  Now to run a VM at a reasonable speed, you need to give the VM resources. My old Precision T7500 did not and could not support the hardware necessary for Win 11. I now h ..read more
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Configuring PowerShell 7 With Group Policy
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2y ago
Introduction Group policy is a feature of Windows Server Active Directory which automagically deploys groups of policies to users and computers. A policy is some computer setting you wish to enforce, such as which screen saver to use, what desktop background to use, or what the default execution policy should be.  Windows PowerShell has for a while allowed you to set certain group policies to control how PowerShell works. Windows PowerShell 5.1 provides five specific policy settings. PowerShell 7 provides all the Windows PowerShell policies, plus one more. I describe each policy below.&nb ..read more
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Viewing PowerShell Files in Preview within WIndows Explorer
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2y ago
Windows Explorer has a nice feature that shows the contents of a selected file. Click on a file and in the right pane you can see the contents. This is a great feature, except it does not work for ALL filetypes out of the box. So would you wish to view a .PS1 file this way - you are out of luck. By default By default, the preview pane is disabled. So you must first enable it. With the latest versions of Windows 11, it looks like this: But even after enabling this, you still can not view .PS1 files (or .PSM1 or .PSD1 files either) in the preview pane within Explorer.   But like just ..read more
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Saving PowerPoint Deck as a PDF - with PowerShell 7
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2y ago
 This week, I got into a twitter discussion about a presenter posting their slides for delegates. My personal preference is to always share the slides. Often, especially when I was working for an employer, I'd share a PDF of the file rather than the slides. Some decks had had a LOT of effort put in (some by inhouse graphics guys) and giving those animations away was sub-optimal for IP reasons.  My approach was to post whatever material was appropriate to a DropBox share - and let people have that. I created a unique Bit.Ly short URL, and put that on the first few and final slides. Si ..read more
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Patching and PowerShell 7
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2y ago
 Many of you reading that blog know I'm a big supporter of PowerShell 7. I hope that many of you share my enthusiasm. After writing several books on PowerShell, and two on PowerShell 7, I find it a pretty good product. One of the challenges which PowerShell brings to the enterprise is updates. Like most software products, there are bugs and vulnerabilities in PowerShell. I was reminded again of this fact reading an article from my Powershell Paper.Li paper. Today the top article comes from Bleeping Computer: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-asks-admins-to-patch-po ..read more
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A Great Book On Windows Terminal
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2y ago
  Review of Will Fuqua’s book “Windows Terminal Tips, Tricks, and Productivity Hacks”   I have had the pleasure of reading through this recently published book (Smile.Amazon.Com). This is a timely book, full of tips and tricks for using the new Windows Terminal. Ever since Microsoft got into the OS business, we’ve had a console or shell built into the OS. The earliest, command.com, gave way to cmd.exe with NT 3.1. And later came Windows PowerShell, the PowerShell ISE and of course PowerShell 7 with VS Code. And now we have Windows Terminal. As the book clarifies, there really are t ..read more
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