What the Shell?!
Greetings to all.
The Appleton PowerShell Users Group is no longer meeting. I have moved out of Wisconsin and Derek has started other projects.
We wanted to thank you for your support and I’ll start posting more once I get settled and organized again.
I’ll be updating the GitHub, Twitter and myGet pages once I start some of the posts again.
Stand by for updates and I hope to post new content starting in Sept 2018.
DJ
Multitasking is distracting. Like most IT people, I start one job, then get thrown 10 more things that “need to be completed ASAP”. Some of them get done quickly, some take some time to query, search, etc. And if you are working on remote systems, just needs to run for a while.
Lately, I have been using splatting more and more in my scripts. For those of you that don’t know what splatting is, let me first demo how it works. Continue reading
I applaud the people and companies that are signing your PowerShell scripts with certificates. For those of you who have not started signing your PowerShell scripts, it’s time to start. and the good news, it is very easy to do! Continue reading
So I do a lot of work creating AD users for different companies. One of the biggest and simplest things is determining what to use for passwords.
The worst thing you can do is to use a “default” passwords for new users and then have them change it when they first login. By default, users can read Active Directory (** gasp **). What that means is that average users can view most user information including when they were created. So, if I was a bad person (which I am not) I would simply check for new users and since the company gave me a “default” password for new users, I would simply try logging in as new users with the default password. So for those companies that have a “default” password – stop it.
Other companies generate a new random password for users. Some based on a predefined list of “safe” words and then adding random symbols and numbers to the end because it’s easy to remember simple words plus a few characters at the end.
My preferred method is really two lines of PowerShell.
For those of you who don’t know what Lorem Ipsum is and know what PowerShell is, let me say this:
For each paragraph, create some random number of sentences, then for each sentence, create a random number of words, and then for each word, create some random letters. But remember, each sentence needs to start with a capital letter and the whole thing should start with “Lorem Ipsum”.
We have created a quick PowerShell Repository where we are going to publish our modules for examples.
Use this code to add a PowerShell Repository to your computer. (Required to have v5… if you can’t run this command “Get-PSRepository” then you can’t add this repository)
$PSRepoName = 'APUG'
$PSGallerySourceUri = 'https://www.myget.org/F/powershellusers/api/v2'
$PSScriptSource = 'https://www.myget.org/F/powershellusersscripts/api/v2'
# This will register a new repository on the local PC
Register-PSRepository -Name $PSRepoName -SourceLocation $PSGallerySourceUri -ScriptSourceLocation $PSScriptSource
Hopefully you find this useful.
As we produce more and have more examples, this will grow.
This is a file to help learn about PowerShell Remoting. It is a quick overview of what it is, how to use implicit remoting and some basic Active Directory cmdlets.
Enjoy.
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