PowerShell – Environment Path is missing or overwritten

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.

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.

A new branch of PSWinReporting is slowly coming, and I thought it would be the best time to have a final article about it with all configuration options available for those that will want to stay using PSWinReporting from Legacy branch. The idea is that you may have it working in your systems and it’s good enough for you. You may not want to change it, and with New Hope, the changes are so big it’s a rewrite.

If you feel this title is very familiar to you it’s because I actually have stolen the title from Kevin Marquette. I’m in awe of his posts that take you thru topic from beginning till the end. No splitting, no hiding anything, everything on a plate, in a single post. That’s why I’ve decided to write a post that will take you on a trip on how to work with Event Logs, something that is an internal part of Windows Administration. If you’ve never worked with Events and you’re in IT you most likely should make an effort to find out what it is and how you can eat it.

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!).

I have to admit – executing the same command three times and expecting different results is dumb, but I still do it anyway. Fortunately, after trying three times I usually resort to other methods and try to solve the problem I have. Today while trying to trust PowerShellGallery I was greeted with an error.

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

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.

Azure AD Connect allows three ways to make sure the user password is the same in Active Directory and Office 365. Those are Password Hash Sync, Pass-Thru Authentication, and ADFS. While my preferred option to go with would be Pass-Thru Authentication, only Password Hash Synchronization is the easiest and least resource-intensive. It synchronizes user password to Office 365, and even if your Active Directory is down, you can still log in to Office 365. It’s perfect for small and even more significant companies that don’t have resources or can’t guarantee that their infrastructure will stay 100% time online so users can authenticate based on their Active Directory.

I had a long day today when my long-running script (10 hours) gave me weird errors with Microsoft Graph for Teams. Finally, I solved my mistakes and reran the hand to see if the report would be complete this time. Surprisingly, it gave me an error I’d never seen before. “Function cannot be created because function capacity 4096 has been exceeded for this scope”. The error is at least weird because it’s shown on a production server where I’ve just a handful of PowerShell modules installed, and I’ve never seen it on my development machine where I’ve over 200 modules.

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.

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!