Monitoring BlackLists with PowerShell module

Today I’m pushing forward with PSWinDocumentation project. I’ve fixed some bugs but I also added a couple of new features. I did lie a bit in the first sentence because this time it’s not all me. I got help from Mateusz Niemczyk who is a certified AWS engineer working for Euvic with me on some projects. If you’ve not yet guessed where I got him involved from the introduction – yes we’re adding basic AWS data support to PSWinDocumentation. But that’s not all…

Having Bitlocker and LAPS in modern Active Directory is a must. But just because you enable GPO and have a process that should say Bitlocker and LAPS are enabled doesn’t mean much. Now and then you should verify things yourself. One of the Facebook users on PowerShell group just had this idea of exporting Bitlocker keys and then giving that list to his colleagues for manual verification. He wanted to do it half PowerShell and half manually. While the idea was great, why not take full advantage of PowerShell and have a helpful report with all the necessary information?

One of the new features I’ve worked on was connecting Diagrams with Tables. Someone suggested, and I thought it would be cool to be able to click on the Diagram node and find more details about it in a table next to it. But then I thought it would be even cooler if you could have multiple tables linked to one Diagram. For example, below, I’ve created two tables with Users and Computers and populated Diagram with that data.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was I, deploying PSPasswordExpiryNotifications for one of my Clients when I started getting complaints that some users are not getting their Password Expiry Notifications. Well, that’s a new one. I’ve tested this script multiple times, and it worked just fine. So I dive into the details of my script to see what I did in there (I don’t even remember anymore – it just works) to find out this little line:

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.

I’ve been working with Windows Events for a while now. One of the things I did to help me diagnose problems and reporting on Windows Events was to write PSEventViewer to help to parse the logs and write PSWinReporting to help monitor (with use of PSEventViewer) Domain Controllers for events that happen across the domain. It’s handy and I, get those excellent daily reports of what happened while I was gone.