Monitoring BlackLists with PowerShell module

We’re in the last days of 2019, and this will be my last blog post this year. What better way to end a good year than with the release of the new PowerShell module. If the title of today’s blog post isn’t giving it up yet, I wanted to share a PowerShell module called PSWritePDF that can help you create and modify (split/merge) PDF documents. It joins my other PowerShell modules to create different types of documents such as PSWriteWord, PSWriteExcel, PSWriteHTML. I know that PSWriteExcel is relatively basic, but both PSWriteHTML and PSWriteWord deliver robust build capabilities.

Active Directory replication is a critical process that ensures the consistent and up-to-date state of directory information across all domain controllers in a domain. Monitoring this process is important as it helps identify any issues that may arise and resolve them quickly. One way to monitor Active Directory replication is by using the Repadmin command-line tool. Repadmin provides a wealth of information about the replication status and health of a domain. However, manually checking the Repadmin output can be time-consuming and tedious, and running it manually every 30 minutes just to check if everything is great doesn’t seem like a great idea. While PowerShell has its own commands around replication I’ve not found something as fast and reliable as repadmin /replsummary.

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.

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.

Duplicate SPNs aren’t very common but can happen in any Active Directory as there’s no built-in way that tracks and prevent duplicate SPN’s. One has to either know all SPN’s in the environment, track them or check each time whether it already exists or not. Things get more complicated with larger Active Directory environments as people change, new apps are added, old apps are forgotten, but SPNs prevail.

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. 

During Microsoft Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Migration one of the steps is to migrated all mailboxes from old servers…

Now that Pester V5 is out, I decided that I need to make sure that my Pester tests for all my modules keep on running correctly. Some substantial changes in Pester add new features, changing some things, but that also means all the tests that you have defined most likely will need a small push to get it up and running again on Pester V5. Starting this blog post, I wanted to mention that I am by no means an expert on Pester, but I do use it for some time now for most of my projects.  I am using basic functionality, but even that basic functionality stops working once you upgrade from PesterV4 to PesterV5, so I thought I would save you some time and give you a small overview of how you can quickly fix it. It works for me, but you may have to find your way to fix things.

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.

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.

Last few days, I’ve fulfilled my little dream related to building HTML tables. You know I’ve been using HTML based scripts for a long while for Microsoft Exchange from multiple people like Steve Goodman or Paul Cunningham (and others) and when I was going thru their PowerShell building code on how they create an HTML table with multi-row titles I thought Those guys are crazy. The effort to build an HTML table for a report for a person who has no clue how to do it is not something one can easily digest and understand. Sure I’ve learned how to build HTML tables at some point, but there was one final piece that I was missing – multi-row headers. If you don’t know what I mean, and how they look like the below image from Steve’s Goodman script should give you a hint.