Monitoring BlackLists with PowerShell module

Today I was reading Twitter, as I am pretty addicted to technology news when Adam Bacon mentioned that he’s surprised that no one has rebuilt IIS Parser as pure PowerShell. While this is not entirely true, and some modules can do some parsing, I decided to try my luck. While doing it from scratch in PowerShell is possible, I opted to use an external C# library that does all the heavy lifting and is optimized for speed.

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 Modules for a while now, and most of my knowledge about them came from Warren F (psCookieMonster) blog about Building a PowerShell Module. It is a handy piece of information and recommended read for anyone starting up writing PowerShell Modules. He introduces an idea where a module is stored in multiple folders Private, Public, Bin, Lib and so on and having YourModule.psm1 as a wrapper for functions, binaries in those folders, where each function is stored in its file. It’s an excellent concept, and I use it every day. It allows me to jump into a file quickly I want to find and fundamentally easier for development, especially in teams.

I’ve been working last few hours trying to set up my laptop for PowerShell Conference, and one of the tasks is to get my modules up and running. To my surprise on Windows 10 1903 Install-Module thrown a weird error

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.

In the last weeks, I’m working on a PowerShell module that the main goal is to work on gathering and fixing GPOs. I’ve been testing my module a lot of times on my test environment, and it worked fine till the moment I run it on production, and it started to fail pretty quickly. The difference between my environment and production is 25 GPOs vs. 5000 GPOs. The error I was getting:

When working with Active Directory one of the common tasks is to move FSMO roles between servers. Well, maybe not that common but it happens from time to time where you have to move all or just some of the FSMO roles. For that purposes, there is single PowerShell command Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationalMasterRole. Sure you can do this via GUI but if there’s one command available to fix it all why bother? To make the move one has to be a Domain Admin, Enterprise Admin and Schema Admin. Everything was going smoothly for some roles but wasn’t working for others.

Recently I was testing renaming the NETBIOS name of an Active Directory domain. While this process is fairly easy, there are a few gotcha’s, and before one would like to rename their domain or NETBIOS name, serious testing is required to be sure everything works after rename. In the end, if something goes wrong, the rollback will not be a walk in a park. It will hurt, and it will eat your time. So there was I going thru the usual steps.

It’s been less than 24 hours since I’ve released PSBlackListChecker with support, among other improvements, for Microsoft Teams and Slack and I’m now adding Discord to the mix. Discord was a popular request (well not really, just one person asked, but let’s pretend everyone loves PSBlackListChecker so much that they are too shy to ask for feature requests!).

Christmas time is upon us, and I’ve decided that my PSTeams module needs some love. I wrote it in late 2018 and updated it a few times at the beginning of 2019. This release hopefully is worth of having 1.0 version number. I don’t do that often and usually go for build numbers changes only, but Microsoft Teams message cards have their limits on functionality. Therefore, there are not many things that can be added unless Microsoft opens up and gives us all the cool features of Adaptive Cards. PSTeams module uses Webconnector to send messages to Teams. That method only supports Message Cards, which even Microsoft calls Legacy. But legacy doesn’t mean fully functional with some cool features of their own. If you’re new to PSTeams you may want to read those 2 posts below to get information how to set it up.

Microsoft Teams over the last few years have grown into an excellent and flexible tool for both small and big companies. Having the ability to chat with users, store files or have all sorts of data in one place makes it easy and functional. Of course, it has its fair share of issues, but it’s getting better. One of the cool features of Microsoft Teams is being able to send notifications to Microsoft Teams Channels using WebHook Notifications. In the beginning, this feature was pretty limited, but after a few years, it got much better with support for Adaptive Cards, List Cards, Hero Cards, Thumbnail Cards, and Office 365 Connector Card.

Few weeks had passed since I’ve initially written PowerShell – Few tricks about HashTables and Arrays I wish I knew when I started. I was happily using my tips and tricks myself till today when I noticed a strange problem. Do you know how I showed you that you could use a comma to return Array with just one member (that otherwise would be unwrapped and end up a string)?

FTPS and SFTP are two ways to send and receive files from remote sources. While the name suggests both do the same thing, those are different protocols, in the end, having the same goal. A few weeks back, I had to make sure I can reliably download files from FTPS server using PowerShell, and since I couldn’t find anything straightforward to use, I decided to write my own. Transfertto is a new PowerShell module that supports both FTPS and SFTP protocols. Its goal is to be the only module that you need to transfer files to and from FTP/SFTP servers.