PSWinReporting 1.0 – Monitoring Active Directrory Events

When you work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you often meet three versions on how those are stored in files – minified, formatted, somewhere in the middle (usually a total mess). I have all three versions in my PSWriteHTML module. Some are minified 3rd party resources, some are generated by my PowerShell commands (and are a total mess when it comes to formatting), and finally, some are formatted resources by using built-in VSCode features. In whatever form they are, they generally have no impact on how browsers display them. Browsers will read them in any kind and not care for how they look.

PSTeams is a PowerShell module that helps simplify sending notifications to Microsoft Teams via Incoming webhooks. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require playing with JSON. Since version 2.0, it started to support Adaptive Cards; in version 2.1, I’ve added the ability to mention people. Today I’m introducing an easy way to send data as a table and a quick way to add a line break.

They say there is a first time for everything. For me, it’s how to download and upload files to Azure Blog Storage using Connection String. Recently I was given Connection String, Container name and had to download some files from Azur Blog Storage. After some research and trying Connect-AzAccount, I found that the proper way to go is thru New-AzStorageContext.

I had this little issue today when I tried to schedule the Microsoft Graph script to run as a service account on a certificate. To my surprise, even tho I had all permissions required, I was getting this error message: Connect-MgGraph: Keyset does not exist. Something that didn’t show up for my user.

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.

I’ve been using Ubiquiti Unifi for some years now, for both home and work usage. It’s great hardware at a great price, and the best thing for a software maniac like me is that it’s continuously updated. Some time ago I upgraded Ubuntu to 18.04, and things went a bit sideways. You see Unifi started to add to their DEB packages that Mongo 3.6 is not supported and therefore blocking any installation. The idea is, it works perfectly fine on MongoDB 3.6 but migration between 3.4 to 3.6 is just not straightforward. Long story short when I upgraded Ubuntu I was suddenly greeted with not working Unifi.  I’ve fixed that, and blogged about it how you can do so using manual steps – Ubuntu 18.04 – Fixing Unifi .deb package to run with 3.6 MongoDB. The thing is with each new version out I have to do multiple steps to fix every single package from Unifi (you see where I’m going right?). While a few years ago I would be stuck to use bash or some other workaround which would be a pain for me, this is 2019, and PowerShell Core works excellent on Linux systems! I know that installing PowerShell Core for hardcore Linux fans may not be as fun as it is for me, but you do get a lot of benefits from it.

I must admit that it was a bit embarrassing to see my Administrator password expired when I tried to log in as Domain Admin to Domain Controller. I got this little message saying This user account’s password has expired. The password must change to logon. Please update the password or contact your system administrator or technical support.

For the last few weeks I’m working on a small project, that should be released within next few weeks (it is open source so don’t worry – you’ll get to play with it). This project requires me to compare two or more objects and tell if those are equal and if those aren’t to what degree. Of course, PowerShell offers built-in functionality via Compare-Object command. It’s mighty but it leaves comparing differences, different properties to you. While there are probably other solutions that help users compare objects, I haven’t found anything that would meet my requirements. After I’ve written Compare-MultipleObjects function, I thought it could be interesting to implement visual comparison – you know human-readable – and I had the perfect place to apply it.

One of the everyday use cases with PSWriteHTML is to create a simple view of PowerShell data in a table. While PowerShell comes with a built-in cmdlet ConvertTo-Html, it’s basic in its functionality. It makes an HTML representation of PowerShell data, but it brings no CSS, JavaScript, or other functionality. While for some use cases, it’s enough, the other times, you need to make an effort to make it usable.