Powershell – Change DNS IP Addresses remotely

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

When you write PowerShell modules, there’s a high chance you will have conflicts with either existing system commands (you should avoid that) or with someone else’s modules. There are also times when someone wants to use a private function from a module that only exports essential functions. Here’s a couple of ways how to deal with those scenarios.

I’m working on a new feature for one of my modules that requires me to know what kind of files I am working with. It’s quite easy in PowerShell, and without a lot of code, you can reasonably quickly get necessary information about data stored on your desktop or anywhere else for that matter.

In Active Directory when you change something, it’s replicated to other Domain Controllers regularly. It’s a standard procedure that happens automatically in the background for you. It’s a handy feature because you can have multiple DC’s all over the world and have your users data in sync. You can change almost anything on DC nearest to you and be sure it will be the same value all over the place. But is it always the same? Well, it should be unless it isn’t. Today I was given a new migration from  Exchange to Office 365. I started with ADConnect installation and wanted to make sure that UserPrincipalNames have all UPNSuffixes in place.

Today I had a need to connect to Microsoft Graph and do some tasks on Office 365. Since I have already done similar stuff for my PSwinDocumentation.O365HealthService PowerShell module that I’ve described in PowerShell to get all information about Office 365 Service Health, I thought this will be easy run as I’ll just reuse the code I’ve done for that module. As always for Graph related tasks you need to register your application and assign correct permissions. I’ve used my own article for that with changes to which API I want to access. Now that I’ve done all that I’ve extracted my Connect-O365Graph function from my module and started connecting.

In the last weeks, I’m working on a PowerShell module that the main goal is to work on gathering and fixing GPOs. I’ve been testing my module a lot of times on my test environment, and it worked fine till the moment I run it on production, and it started to fail pretty quickly. The difference between my environment and production is 25 GPOs vs. 5000 GPOs. The error I was getting:

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.

The security account manager (SAM) has determined that the security identifier (SID) for this computer is already in use in the Forest you want to join. This can happen when restoring an Active Directory Domain Controller with an improper backup. Reinstall the operating system on the local AD DC to obtain a new SID.

One of the most comfortable output’s in PowerShell to work and analyze data is Out-GridView. It’s handy as you can search, sort and have things done quicker than trying to do things in the console. However it’s currently not available in PowerShell Core (PowerShell 6+), and when it is available in PowerShell 7, it will NOT be cross-platform.  Since I had released Dashimo a few days ago, I thought it was trivial to make a simple command out of it that could solve this problem.

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.

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!