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• n2501r
PowerShell for Admins

Media Sync: Organize Your Photos and Videos with PowerShell

Do you have photos and videos that you have taken over the years that are scattered all over the place? Do you want to have all your photos and videos organized? Do you want all your photos and videos to have a standardized naming scheme? If you answered YES to these questions, then this is the post for you. In this post, I will provide you with the PowerShell code and examples for how to use the Media Sync script.

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• n2501r
PowerShell for Admins

NetNeighbor Watch: The PowerShell Alternative To Arpwatch

In this post, we are going to setup NetNeighbor Watch on a Raspberry Pi. NetNeighbor Watch can keep an eye on your network and send you an email when a new host is discovered. NetNeighbor Watch is done completely in PowerShell. The results are very similar to those of arpwatch. NetNeighbor Watch is for anyone that wants more visibility into the wireless or wired devices on their network. We will also setup a weekly email report with all of the known hosts on your network.

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• n2501r
PowerShell for Admins

Creating a PowerShell Module to Improve Your Code

Do you have PowerShell code that you reuse in your scripts over and over? Do you have server names hard coded in variables? Are you using a text file or CSV file to import server names? Do you find yourself only utilizing one server out of a cluster of servers to make your PowerShell commands? These are the questions I asked myself and the answer used to be YES. In this post, I will go over how you can store your infrastructure server information in a SQL database and call that data from a custom PowerShell module.

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• n2501r
PowerShell for Admins

Simple PowerShell GUI

Over the years, I have supported and created multiple types of GUIs. I finally decided a few years ago to create a very simple menu driven PowerShell GUI. I wanted something that was very powerful yet very simple to maintain. I really enjoy automating manual administrative tasks, so that is what drove this project in the first place. Before I created the menu driven PowerShell GUI, I had directories and directories of very specific scripts to do specific tasks.

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• Colyn Via
PowerShell for Admins

The Ternary Cometh

Developers are likely to be familiar with ternary conditional operators as they’re legal in many languages (Ruby, Python, C++, etc). They’re also often used in coding interviews to test an applicant as they can be a familiar source of code errors. While some developers couldn’t care less about ternary operators, there’s been a cult following waiting for them to show up in Powershell. That day is almost upon us. Any Powershell developer can easily be forgiven for scratching their heads and wondering what a ternary is.

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• Nathaniel Webb (ArtisanByteCrafter)
PowerShell for Admins

Learn To Use Verbose Output Streams In Your Pester Tests

I’m going to file this under “Either I’m a genius, or there’s a much better way and everyone knows it except for me.” I recently began adding a suite of Pester tests to one of my projects and I found myself needing to mock some unit tests against a particular function that would modify a variable based on the parameter specified. Since all the functions I write nowadays are considered advanced functions (and yours should be too, they’re free!

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• Nathaniel Webb (ArtisanByteCrafter)
PowerShell for Admins

Secure Your Powershell Session with JEA and Constrained Endpoints

Index What is a Constrained Endpoint and Why Would I Need One? Setup and Configuration Using our Endpoint What is a constrained endpoint and why would I need one? Powershell constrained endpoints are a means of interacting with powershell in a manner consistent with the principal of least privilege. In Powershell terms, this is referred to as Just-Enough-Administration, or JEA. JEA is very well documented, so this won’t simply be repeating everything those references detail.

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• WeiYen Tan
PowerShell for Admins

Pester – Parameters and Hashtable Fun!

I have written a short excerpt on how to pass parameters from an object to a Pester test. I have turned this into a function: Invoke-POVTest. The function is primarily for operational validation tests, where you might have a single operational test but you need to test multiple cases. (Sorry, I am not quite sure if I described it properly). I’ll be interested in any feedback. Link to blog post here.

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• msorens
PowerShell for Admins

PowerShell Gotchas

You can certainly find a number of articles around that present PowerShell pitfalls that can easily trip you up if you are not careful. I took a different approach in my three-part series, A Plethora of PowerShell Pitfalls. The first two parts are presented in quiz format, together covering the top 10 “gotchas”. They will help you test your awareness to see if you even realized the danger and did not know you’ve been skirting those traps for awhile.

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• msorens
PowerShell for Admins

Pitfalls of the Pipeline

Pipelining is an important concept in PowerShell. Though the idea did not originate with PowerShell (you can find it used decades earlier in Unix, for example), PowerShell does provide the unique advantage of being able to pipeline not just text, but first-class .NET objects. Pipelining has several advantages: It helps to conserve memory resources. Say you want to modify text in a huge file. Without a pipeline you might read the huge file into memory, modify the appropriate lines, and write the file back out to disk.

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