Monitoring LDAPS connectivity/certificate with PowerShell

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.

We need to deal with a group names through SID’s rather than names because each group name is different in different languages. The second problem is to distinguish whether a user is a local or domain user. Finally, I need to connect to Active Directory to verify if the user I am about to remove has ExtensionAttribute10 (or any other field in AD) filled in or not.

Office 365 is a huge beast. It has so many services that it’s hard to track all of them. It’s even harder if you want to manage Office 365 using PowerShell. Microsoft makes many different PowerShell modules available for you, such as AzureAD, AzureADPreview, ExchangeOnline, MicrosoftTeams, and recently, Microsoft.Graph. But even with so many different modules, there are still tasks that Microsoft won’t let you do from PowerShell. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to do it. I’ve spent some time tracking how Microsoft does things while you click thru the interface and created an O365Essentials PowerShell module that can do it in an automated way.

When you’re using Office 365 and want to send an email, you have two choices SMTP or Microsoft Graph API, which is a “new” kid on the block. For some time, I’ve used Microsoft Graph exclusively to send emails in favor of SMTP as it’s much easier to manage and generally works over HTTPS. If you type in google “Send email graph API PowerShell,” you will get lots of hits as bloggers, and Microsoft has already covered this topic. It’s even more critical than ever because Basic Authentication is deprecated in Office 365. To help out with the transition, Microsoft even released its PowerShell module. With Send-MgUserMail proposed as a way to send emails via Graph API, you will notice it’s far from being easy & user-friendly. Over two years ago, I released a PowerShell module called Mailozaurr (some people may not like my modules’ naming – but that’s how I roll!). In a blog post, Mailozaurr – New mail toolkit (SMTP, IMAP, POP3) with support for oAuth 2.0 and GraphApi for PowerShell, I’ve shown a basic functionality on how to send emails using SMTP OAuth 2.0 or Graph API, which aims to be drag & drop replacement over Send-MailMessage and is supposed to be as simple as possible to send an email with a low effort and high readability. You can also read on sending emails using Graph API by Tony Redmond in his blog post Moving on from Send-MailMessage: Sending Email from PowerShell using the Graph API.

Some months ago, I created PowerShell Script to create local administrative users on workstations – Create a local user or administrator account in Windows using PowerShell. It’s a bit overcomplicated, but the goal was it should work for Windows 7 and up, and that means supporting PowerShell 2.0. As part of that exercise, I’ve been using Win32_UserAccount WMI based query to find local users and manage them to an extent. While Get-LocalUser exists, it’s not suitable for the PowerShell 2.0 scenario. I also use the same query in GPO for WMI filtering. You can say it’s been a good friend of mine.

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!

Today I saw an article from Christian Ritter, “PowerShell: Creating an “empty” PSCustomObject” on X that got me curious. Do people create empty objects like Christian proposes? I want to offer an alternative to Christian’s article, which uses OrderedDictionary and converts to PSCustomObject.

Today I saw an article on how to get Windows Version Report from Active Directory and thought that this is a cool idea. Something handy for migration scenarios or information on how up to date is your infrastructure. Since there are many ways to do the same thing I decided to tackle this myself and further include it into PSWinDocumentation.AD project. By default Active Directory stores Operating System and Operating System Version but it doesn’t really show versions one may expect.

Working as a small business often brings you little tasks here and there. Today I’ve decided to shut down the Hyper-V machine to expand its disks. Unfortunately for me, while extending of HDD went great, I couldn’t start Virtual Machine any longer.

It’s no secret that nobody likes creating documentation. I don’t like it, and you don’t like it, even documentation lovers don’t like it. But while you can live without documentation, you really shouldn’t. And I am not talking here only about documentation that is only useful in the onboarding process of new employees or documentation concerning introducing someone to some concepts to get them easily start. I’m talking about documentation for your live environment where you know what you have, how you have set it up, but is still the same after one week, one month, or one year? Usually, not so much. And one of the worst mistakes admin can do is assume that his environment doesn’t change, things are as they were when they were set up.

ImagePlayground is a PowerShell module that works in PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7+. It works partially on Linux and should work on macOS, except for charts. That means it’s partially cross-platform, but the end goal is to make it work fully on all platforms. So what can this module do?

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. 

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.