Install-Module : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name AllowPrerelease.

Dashimo ultimate goal is to be as easy to use as possible. With the introduction of it a few days ago I made a promise to myself that I want to keep it as simple to use as possible. If you don’t know what Dashimo is, have a read here – Meet Dashimo. When I posted it on Reddit few people had some ideas and feature request that would make it a bit nicer, and when I heard about I agreed. So today, after a couple of days I have a few updates. I also noticed that my examples might have been too hard to use and understand for beginners and people not having a lot of touch with Active Directory. This time all code you can find below will use Get-Process as a way to show you that you can use any output that comes as a Table.

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!

Recently I was testing renaming the NETBIOS name of an Active Directory domain. While this process is fairly easy, there are a few gotcha’s, and before one would like to rename their domain or NETBIOS name, serious testing is required to be sure everything works after rename. In the end, if something goes wrong, the rollback will not be a walk in a park. It will hurt, and it will eat your time. So there was I going thru the usual steps.

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.

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?

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.

I’ve been working today on a little project when suddenly my modules stopped working. It was weird because I have not touched anything that could cause it. A message was a bit cryptic mentioning that my PSWriteColor module is required but not available. I’ve decided to try and load PSWriteColor manually using Import-Module command.

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.

In March 2020, Microsoft will release its monthly updates. With those updates, Microsoft will disable insecure LDAP Bindings, which is going to break a lot of your systems (hopefully not). But this was already communicated, and you know all about it, right? If not, you should read those two articles that can help you with understanding what is happening and when.