Office 365 – The following error occurred during validation in agent Archive ParameterSet Enforcement Agent

Some time ago, I decided that having an easy-to-use PGP PowerShell module is a way to kill my boredom. Four months have passed, and I decided to share it with the world, as it may be helpful to some of you.  Today I would like to introduce you to PSPGP – PowerShell module that provides PGP functionality in PowerShell.

I shouldn’t be telling you that, but Active Directory Backup is an essential part of your Active Directory setup. When a backup of Active Directory happens, AD is aware of it. Following PowerShell solution allows you to get Active Directory Last Backup Time for the whole forest or by domain.

In today’s digital age, the ability to create compelling and informative HTML reports and documents is a crucial skill for professionals in various fields. Whether you’re a data analyst, a system administrator, a developer, or simply someone who wants to present information in an organized and visually appealing manner, having the right tools at your disposal can make all the difference. That’s where the PSWriteHTML PowerShell module steps in, offering an array of possibilities to suit your reporting needs.

I’ve been using Ubiquiti Unifi for some years now, for both home and work usage. It’s great hardware at a great price, and the best thing for a software maniac like me is that it’s continuously updated. Some time ago I upgraded Ubuntu to 18.04, and things went a bit sideways. You see Unifi started to add to their DEB packages that Mongo 3.6 is not supported and therefore blocking any installation. The idea is, it works perfectly fine on MongoDB 3.6 but migration between 3.4 to 3.6 is just not straightforward. Long story short when I upgraded Ubuntu I was suddenly greeted with not working Unifi.  I’ve fixed that, and blogged about it how you can do so using manual steps – Ubuntu 18.04 – Fixing Unifi .deb package to run with 3.6 MongoDB. The thing is with each new version out I have to do multiple steps to fix every single package from Unifi (you see where I’m going right?). While a few years ago I would be stuck to use bash or some other workaround which would be a pain for me, this is 2019, and PowerShell Core works excellent on Linux systems! I know that installing PowerShell Core for hardcore Linux fans may not be as fun as it is for me, but you do get a lot of benefits from it.

A few days ago, I tried to use Install-Module on the old Windows 2008R2 system that I use for specific tasks.

I’m a big fan of PowerShellGallery. It’s easy to use, Microsoft owned, a place to host your PowerShell modules. Every time I release a new PowerShell module, it’s readily available for me or anyone with a single command Install-Module. No need to host it yourself, no need to prepare anything – plug & play. Additionally, if your PowerShell module has any dependencies, it will download and install them, so it directly works out of the box. But what if you can’t use PowerShellGallery? What if you don’t want to use Install-Module on 100 computers, but you prefer to do it in a more controlled way? What if your servers do not have internet connectivity?

Working as a small business often brings you little tasks here and there. Today I’ve decided to shut down the Hyper-V machine to expand its disks. Unfortunately for me, while extending of HDD went great, I couldn’t start Virtual Machine any longer.

Virus Total is an excellent service. It’s a single place where hundreds of antivirus engines can verify if the file, URL, domain name, or IP Address is trusted or not. Of course, it’s not a silver bullet, but it brings tremendous value, and I often verify files I download before executing. Since I release a lot of new or updated PowerShell modules on a weekly/monthly basis, I thought it would be great to send newly released versions straight to Virus Total so I can have them checked before anyone executes them. I also hope to prevent false positives from some antivirus vendors that may tag my modules as malware because they haven’t seen the DLL or PowerShell module in this form before. I’ve seen it happen to DBATools, so why not try and push my modules before users even use them?

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.

Since my website went down in fire with OVH SBG2, I used this occasion to publish my restored website via Cloudflare. It allows me to have to cache, minimization, and some additional security. One thing that caught my attention while browsing through Cloudflare settings was the Always Online feature based on web.archive.org. Basically, the concept is – whenever the website is down, Cloudflare would go and fetch content from web.archive.org.