Update-Module – PackageManagement\Install-Package : Unable to find repository

As you may know, PowerShell has multiple streams. Write-Output, Write-Error, Write-Warning, Write-Verbose, Write-Debug, and Write-Information. It also has Write-Host which until PowerShell 5 was a bit special. Since PowerShell 5.1 it’s a wrapper over Write-Information, so it doesn’t kill puppies anymore. While I could spend the next five pages trying to give my best and describe those streams, there are already many articles describing them in detail. Please check the following link if you need that information.

I’ve been using PowerShell for a long while now using Hashtables, OrderedDictionary, and other types of data types in PowerShell, but I never paid attention to how powerful those are. And I don’t mean your general knowledge about hashtables that is already covered by Kevin Marquette in his article Everything you wanted to know about Hashtables or my article PowerShell – Few tricks about HashTables and Arrays I wish I knew when I started. Let’s find out, how Powerful they are, shall we?

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.

I’m on a tight deadline for one of the chapters for PowerShell Conference Book vol. 2. That means my brain wants me to do a lot of different things but writing that chapter. I’ve decided to write this simple PowerShell command that allows me to use Lansweeper in PowerShell. If you never heard of Lansweeper, it’s a great inventory tool that can scan Windows, Linux, Network, Printers, and other types of assets gathering it all in SQL Database. Usually, you would use their friendly, fast interface to access data it stores because it offers a lot of flexibility, export options, and many many features.

Recently there was this discussion on PowerShell Group on Facebook about issue posted by one user. While the subject doesn’t matter for this post, few people commented on the idea that he was using Format-Table in the middle of the pipeline to do something. They all said Format-Table should be used as last in the pipeline. Otherwise, you would get the wrong output. But should it? Well, it depends!

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.

Hosting your VM’s in Azure Cloud is excellent. You have all those features, professionally managed and virtually limitless. I don’t want to take your time to sell you Azure Services but to share a solution to one of the things I had to solve in Azure and sooner or later you may end up with on. During the test restore for Active Directory and multiple other machines which were much older (or newer) then Active Directory Domain Controller that was restored it turned out one can’t log in to most of the devices. First of all your domain password is already changed, but that can quickly be addressed. Your second and more significant problem is Network Level Authentication (NLA), and your 3rd problem is broken trust relationship.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post on how you can compare two or more objects visually in PowerShell that works on Windows, Linux, or macOS. I’ve been using that for a while, but it had a specific flaw. Comparing more advanced objects that you often see (for example, returned by Graph API, two config files) wasn’t working correctly, often throwing errors. The reason for this was that having nested hashtables arrays require more advanced logic. Today I’ve updated my module to use the ConvertTo-FlatObject function, which allows the Compare-MultipleObjects function to compare suitably more advanced objects hopefully. Of course, it should not throw errors anymore.

I had this little issue today when I tried to schedule the Microsoft Graph script to run as a service account on a certificate. To my surprise, even tho I had all permissions required, I was getting this error message: Connect-MgGraph: Keyset does not exist. Something that didn’t show up for my user.

In my earlier blog post, I showed you a way to find duplicate DNS entries using PowerShell, but the focus was on finding duplicate entries based on hostname. But what if you would like to find duplicate entries based on IP Addresses? This was the question I was asked on Reddit, and I thought it was a legitimate request, so today’s focus will be on transposing table output from earlier functions to present data differently. 

In the last few days, I’ve got two reports that my PowerShell module for Office 365 Health suddenly started giving errors. This was a bit weird because it worked perfectly fine on my end. But while I could understand one person having an issue of their own, with their network or firewalls, if the second person comes along with the same report, that means something else is going on.

Recently we were tasked with testing connectivity with Good For Enterprise servers. Since the environment is highly secure it requires…

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.

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.