Office 365 – Using Import-PSSession from separate module

While the title of this blog may be a bit exaggeration, the command I’m trying to show here does it’s best to deliver on the promise. What you’re about to witness here is something I’ve worked on for a while now, and it meets my basic needs. If you don’t have SIEM product or products that monitor who does what in Active Directory this command makes it very easy, even for people who don’t have much experience in reading Event Logs. If you’d like to learn about working with Windows Event Logs here’s a great article I wrote recently – PowerShell – Everything you wanted to know about Event Logs and then some.

FTPS and SFTP are two ways to send and receive files from remote sources. While the name suggests both do the same thing, those are different protocols, in the end, having the same goal. A few weeks back, I had to make sure I can reliably download files from FTPS server using PowerShell, and since I couldn’t find anything straightforward to use, I decided to write my own. Transfertto is a new PowerShell module that supports both FTPS and SFTP protocols. Its goal is to be the only module that you need to transfer files to and from FTP/SFTP servers.

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. 

I work a lot with Active Directory-related tasks. One of the tasks is to know the group membership of critical Active Directory Groups such as Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, Schema Admins, Event Log Readers, and a few others that are a bit less known. As I did it, I got bored of typing the group names repeatedly and decided that enough was enough and there must be an easier way for me to do that.

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?

Office 365 is an excellent cloud service. But like any service, there’s some infrastructure behind it that has to be cared for. Since this is Cloud, Microsoft does this for you. But any problems Microsoft has to have some impact on your end users. And you may want to have that visibility for your users. Microsoft provides this to Admins when they login to the portal, but while useful you may want to use that data in other ways than those planned by Microsoft.

Two years ago, I wrote a PowerShell module called PSWinDocumentation.O365HealthService. The idea was simple – replicate Health Service data Microsoft offers in Office Portal so you can do with data whatever you want and display it however you like. I’ve written about it in this blog post. A few weeks back, someone reported that the module stopped working, and  I’ve confirmed it indeed no longer works! Initially, I thought that maybe some data format changed, as it changed multiple times, or perhaps the date format was wrong again, but no. Microsoft has deprecated Office 365 Service Communications API reference and instead tells us that Service Health is now only available via Microsoft Graph API. Is it only me who didn’t get the memo about this?

Last few weeks I’m responsible for migrating from Office 365 to Office 365. Part of this migration process is to set up new Exchange 2016 server that will work as relay instead of using IIS server. I’ve setup hybrid, added accepted domains, prepared connectors, but there’s one thing missing. Any time an email is sent via relay to a user that exists on Office 365 and at the same time exists in Active Directory email never gets there.

Another day, another issue one may say. Today I wanted to install one of my modules to a new server and was greeted with a well-known message (it may seem on first look): A command with name ” is already available on this system. This module ‘PSEventViewer’ may override the existing commands. If you still want to install this module ‘PSEventViewer’, use -AllowClobber parameter.

When I created ImagePlayground, I thought about how to show its usefulness to the general community. On how to deliver what PowerShell can do. Then I saw on some forum people asking BGInfo to expand and allow running PowerShell scripts so that the data on the BGInfo Wallpaper can be gathered from PowerShell rather than VBS. I thought this was a great idea to create BGInfo using PowerShell without the necessity of using BGInfo at all.

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.