Monitoring LDAPS connectivity/certificate with PowerShell

While the title of this blog may be a bit exaggeration, the command I’m trying to show here does it’s best to deliver on the promise. What you’re about to witness here is something I’ve worked on for a while now, and it meets my basic needs. If you don’t have SIEM product or products that monitor who does what in Active Directory this command makes it very easy, even for people who don’t have much experience in reading Event Logs. If you’d like to learn about working with Windows Event Logs here’s a great article I wrote recently – PowerShell – Everything you wanted to know about Event Logs and then some.

Office 365 is an excellent cloud service. But like any service, there’s some infrastructure behind it that has to be cared for. Since this is Cloud, Microsoft does this for you. But any problems Microsoft has to have some impact on your end users. And you may want to have that visibility for your users. Microsoft provides this to Admins when they login to the portal, but while useful you may want to use that data in other ways than those planned by Microsoft.

One of the everyday use cases with PSWriteHTML is to create a simple view of PowerShell data in a table. While PowerShell comes with a built-in cmdlet ConvertTo-Html, it’s basic in its functionality. It makes an HTML representation of PowerShell data, but it brings no CSS, JavaScript, or other functionality. While for some use cases, it’s enough, the other times, you need to make an effort to make it usable.

A few weeks ago I’ve released my first version of PSWinDocumentation. It was simple, one command module where you start it and get some basic AD stuff into Microsoft Word document. Today… I’m releasing a new version that has a bit bigger feature set. Are you ready for it? Let’s go!

They say there is a first time for everything. For me, it’s how to download and upload files to Azure Blog Storage using Connection String. Recently I was given Connection String, Container name and had to download some files from Azur Blog Storage. After some research and trying Connect-AzAccount, I found that the proper way to go is thru New-AzStorageContext.

Office 365 has a lot of options and applications to choose from. Enabling one E1, E3, or any other license gives the user a lot of features, including Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams. But what if you want to make sure that the user can access only Microsoft Teams? By default, you can do it manually during the assignment of the license. Simply choose only Apps you want to assign to a user.

Recently I got a simple task to implement LAPS for the newly created local user instead of using the built-in local administrator account. It seemed easy at first. Go to Group Policies, create a new user, add it to an administrators group, and then follow standard steps to implement LAPS. That is until you find out it’s actually not possible anymore due to password encryption key being available in the wild, which made Microsoft block that Group Policy Preference. While that road is blocked, I still need to get my user-created somehow. Let’s do it with PowerShell. It’s quite simple – use New-LocalUser a few parameters, some random password that I don’t need to save as LAPS will overwrite it. Except it’s not available on PowerShell 2.0, which is the default for Windows 7 that I have to support. Things get even more complicated if you consider that Administrators group is called differently in different countries. While I stopped supporting anything below PowerShell 5.1, I can’t say if it’s the project requirement.

Working with Office 365 is my bread and butter in the last few months. I’m a System Architect and I am dropped in multiple projects, both new and old, to fix certain aspect and get out before anyone sees me. One of the common tasks I get is to provide some data about users stored in Office 365.

Active Directory Trusts are useful to connect one or more domains. But as useful those are, they can be very dangerous. Also, keeping trusts working and in good shape should be a top priority for Active Directory Admins. While there is a couple of command in the Active Directory module Get-ADTrust, I thought I would try and write my own that checks a few more things. I want to thank Chris Dent for his input on the part of this command. His binary skills amaze me!

A few weeks ago, Mateusz Czerniawski, mentioned that he wants to build a Status Page for his company services. While I haven’t needed for myself, it seems like an excellent idea to try and create one in PowerShell. Since I’ve been working on PSWriteHTML for a while, it wasn’t that far fetched idea. While PSWriteHTML has a long way to go, to be in a state I want it to be, after a few days I had a prototype that didn’t require much work to generate. If you’re wondering what Status Page is it’s a little summary page for your users to check what is the status of services they use. It has been popular in the last few years and is offered by many services (Twitter, GitHub, Office 365 – they all have it). Companies are selling it as a service as well where you can host your status page for your users. This one is free.

Dashimo ultimate goal is to be as easy to use as possible. With the introduction of it a few days ago I made a promise to myself that I want to keep it as simple to use as possible. If you don’t know what Dashimo is, have a read here – Meet Dashimo. When I posted it on Reddit few people had some ideas and feature request that would make it a bit nicer, and when I heard about I agreed. So today, after a couple of days I have a few updates. I also noticed that my examples might have been too hard to use and understand for beginners and people not having a lot of touch with Active Directory. This time all code you can find below will use Get-Process as a way to show you that you can use any output that comes as a Table.

As part of my daily development, I create lots of code that I subsequently comment on and leave to ensure I understand what I tried, what worked, and what didn’t. This is my usual method of solving a problem. Sure, I could commit it to git and then look it up, and I do that, but that doesn’t change my behavior where I happen to have lots of “junk” inside of my functions that stay commented out. While this works for me, and I’ve accepted this as part of my process, I don’t believe this should be part of the production code on PowerShellGallery or when the code is deployed.

PSTeams is a PowerShell module that helps simplify sending notifications to Microsoft Teams via Incoming webhooks. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require playing with JSON. Since version 2.0, it started to support Adaptive Cards; in version 2.1, I’ve added the ability to mention people. Today I’m introducing an easy way to send data as a table and a quick way to add a line break.