Powershell – Zdalna zmiana ustawień adresów DNS

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?

I’ve been working today trying to deliver to one of my Clients Active Directory documentation. To my surprise, something that worked fine for a very long time has started to provide weird results. So, after spending about 8 hours taking apart a few of my PowerShell modules trying to find out what is wrong finally, I’ve found it: Export-CliXML / Import-CliXML. Those two commands are great. I’ve used them multiple times with great success (or so I thought).

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 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.

Today, I’m introducing a new PowerShell module called Mailozaurr. It’s a module that aims to deliver functionality around Email for multiple use cases. I’ve started it since native SMTP cmdlet Send-MailMessage is obsolete,  and I thought it would be good to write a replacement that adds more features over it as things around us are changing rapidly.

Today I’ve been setting up a new server on Windows 2019. By default, I install Windows with English version even if Client works in their language such as German, Polish or Swedish. While some people install Windows in a language they desire to work with, years of experience taught me that installing English and then adding Language Pack is the best way to go. All errors, windows events, and general troubleshooting is much easier if those are in the native English language. Each version of Windows made it easier to install the language pack and have that up and running in no time. In Windows 2019 it’s even more comfortable… or is it?

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.

Another day, another issue one may say. Today I wanted to install one of my modules to a new server and was greeted with a well-known message (it may seem on first look): A command with name ” is already available on this system. This module ‘PSEventViewer’ may override the existing commands. If you still want to install this module ‘PSEventViewer’, use -AllowClobber parameter.

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.

Sending emails in Microsoft Exchange world using an alias for an account has always been a pain. It required working with workarounds such as setting up Shared Mailbox or Distribution Groups and using SendAs permissions. For years admins around the world were asking Microsoft to change this, and finally, in April 2021, they did! It’s a new feature of Office 365, and it requires action from Office 365 Administrator.

As you may have seen in my other post, there’s a simple, PowerShell way to get Office 365 Health Service data for you to use any way you like it. But before you can use that, you need to register granular permissions on your Office  365 tenant so that that data is provided to you. Here’s a step by step way to do it.