Install-Module : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name AllowPrerelease.

One of the common ways to connect to Active Directory is thru LDAP protocol. There are a lot of applications that talk to AD via LDAP. By default Active Directory has LDAP enabled but that’s a bit insecure in today’s world. That’s where LDAPS comes in. It’s not easy to set up, but when you get it done, it works. The problem I had recently is that while setting up LDAPS on DC’s I only did this on some of the DC’s, and not all of them as I should.

It’s year 2020 and 365 days passed since my last year blog post about PowerShell modules I worked on in 2018. I thought it would be a good occasion to review what happened and how things changed during that time. When I wrote the last blog post in the first days of 2019, my PowerShell modules were downloaded just a bit over 15000 times. Fast Forward today, and the counter is at 280000 times spread over 40 modules. Of course, not all those modules are equal. In 2019 I created multiple new PowerShell modules, but some modules were archived, while others were migrated back to their „parents”. Just to see how my community road was going in the last years I decided to check some statistics.

I am a pretty big fan of Ubiquiti and their Unifi products line. Whether it’s network equipment or their camera systems, Unifi Protect, I have it all, and I’m pretty happy with how it works. However, over the last two years, some of their stocks in the store were very hard to find. For example, I’ve searched for Unifi Protect G4 Doorbell Pro for over six months. I’ve tried local shops all around Europe, even in the Ubiquiti Europe store, to never found any of them.

Today I saw an article from Christian Ritter, „PowerShell: Creating an „empty” PSCustomObject” on X that got me curious. Do people create empty objects like Christian proposes? I want to offer an alternative to Christian’s article, which uses OrderedDictionary and converts to PSCustomObject.

One of the new features I’ve worked on was connecting Diagrams with Tables. Someone suggested, and I thought it would be cool to be able to click on the Diagram node and find more details about it in a table next to it. But then I thought it would be even cooler if you could have multiple tables linked to one Diagram. For example, below, I’ve created two tables with Users and Computers and populated Diagram with that data.

PowerShell language allows you to work and build complicated objects. There are multiple ways to save them, such as XML or JSON, but sometimes using them is impossible or inadequate. Sometimes you want to use HTML or CSV or any other single dimension output.

In my earlier blog post, I showed you a way to find duplicate DNS entries using PowerShell, but the focus was on finding duplicate entries based on hostname. But what if you would like to find duplicate entries based on IP Addresses? This was the question I was asked on Reddit, and I thought it was a legitimate request, so today’s focus will be on transposing table output from earlier functions to present data differently. 

Some time ago I’ve wrote PowerShell way to get all information about Office 365 Service Health, and if you were thinking that I would try the same concept for Azure Services you were right. However, I failed. This is because Office 365 Health can be gathered using Microsoft Graph API, and Azure Health information, as far as I know, is not available in the form I wanted it. Azure Status is available as part of Azure Status website. Contrary to Office 365 health you don’t have to login to your Office 365 tenant to read it.

I’ve been working with PowerShell for a while now and like with most things I do I’ve learned it by doing and not by reading. I had a job to do, and since I don’t like doing things over and over, I thought it’s time to learn and do it in PowerShell. Problem with that approach is that you take bits and pieces from PowerShell scripts online that sometimes do the job but not necessarily pay attention to details. And it’s fine. I’ve learned a lot from reading someone else’s work, and I learn something new every day. Hopefully, it will be useful to you to some extent.

Setting up a new Active Directory is an easy task. You download and install Windows Server, install required roles and in 4 hours or less have a basic Active Directory setup. In an ideal world that would be all and your only task would be to manage users, computers, and groups occasionally creating some Group Policies. Unfortunately, things with Active Directory aren’t as easy as I’ve pictured it. Active Directory is a whole ecosystem and works well ranging from small companies with ten users to 500k users or more (haven’t seen one myself – but so they say!). When you scale Active Directory adding more servers, more domains things tend to get complicated, and while things on top may look like they work correctly, in practice, they may not. That’s why, as an Administrator, you need to manage Active Directory in terms of its Health and Security. Seems easy right? Not quite. While you may think you have done everything, checked everything, there’s always something missing. Unless you have instructions for everything and can guarantee that things stay the same way as you left them forever, it’s a bit more complicated. That’s why Microsoft delivers you tools to the troubleshoot your Active Directory, such as dcdiag, repadmin and some others. They also sell monitoring solutions such as Microsoft SCOM which can help and detect when some things happen in your AD while you were gone. Surely there are some 3rd party companies give you some tools that can help with a lot of that as well. Finally, there is lo of folks within the community creating PowerShell scripts or functions that help with some Health Checks of your Active Directory.