Reading IIS logs with PowerShell

PSTeams PowerShell module has been on the market for a while now. It supports sending notifications to Microsoft Teams channels via Incoming WebHooks. You could send a pretty message to the team’s channel with just a few lines of code. With PSTeams 2.0, support for Adaptive Cards, Hero Cards, List Cards, and Thumbnail Cards was added.

PasswordSolution uses the DSInternals PowerShell module to gather Active Directory hashes and then combines that data into a prettified report. If you have ever used DSInternals, you know that while very powerful, it comes with raw data that is hard to process and requires some skills to get it into a state that can be shown to management or security.

I’ve been working with PowerShell for a while now and like with most things I do I’ve learned it by doing and not by reading. I had a job to do, and since I don’t like doing things over and over, I thought it’s time to learn and do it in PowerShell. Problem with that approach is that you take bits and pieces from PowerShell scripts online that sometimes do the job but not necessarily pay attention to details. And it’s fine. I’ve learned a lot from reading someone else’s work, and I learn something new every day. Hopefully, it will be useful to you to some extent.

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?

I had a long day today when my long-running script (10 hours) gave me weird errors with Microsoft Graph for Teams. Finally, I solved my mistakes and reran the hand to see if the report would be complete this time. Surprisingly, it gave me an error I’d never seen before. “Function cannot be created because function capacity 4096 has been exceeded for this scope”. The error is at least weird because it’s shown on a production server where I’ve just a handful of PowerShell modules installed, and I’ve never seen it on my development machine where I’ve over 200 modules.

Recently I got a simple task to implement LAPS for the newly created local user instead of using the built-in local administrator account. It seemed easy at first. Go to Group Policies, create a new user, add it to an administrators group, and then follow standard steps to implement LAPS. That is until you find out it’s actually not possible anymore due to password encryption key being available in the wild, which made Microsoft block that Group Policy Preference. While that road is blocked, I still need to get my user-created somehow. Let’s do it with PowerShell. It’s quite simple – use New-LocalUser a few parameters, some random password that I don’t need to save as LAPS will overwrite it. Except it’s not available on PowerShell 2.0, which is the default for Windows 7 that I have to support. Things get even more complicated if you consider that Administrators group is called differently in different countries. While I stopped supporting anything below PowerShell 5.1, I can’t say if it’s the project requirement.

In today’s digital age, the ability to create compelling and informative HTML reports and documents is a crucial skill for professionals in various fields. Whether you’re a data analyst, a system administrator, a developer, or simply someone who wants to present information in an organized and visually appealing manner, having the right tools at your disposal can make all the difference. That’s where the PSWriteHTML PowerShell module steps in, offering an array of possibilities to suit your reporting needs.

Everyone now and then, there comes a moment you need to add a user into Administrators group on each computer…

A few months ago when I first released Dashimo, I’ve promised that Charts will come. Unfortunately, time passed by, and there were no Charts in sight. It’s not that I didn’t want to deliver, I just wasn’t sure on the way I want to allow charts building. Today after playing with the idea for a while I’ve decided to release essential support for diagrams, with a couple of other fixes. Some of that stuff is already there for longer while I just never announced it. There are probably a lot of other hidden gems you may find if you explore PSWriteHTML or Dashimo.

Active Directory Trusts are useful to connect one or more domains. But as useful those are, they can be very dangerous. Also, keeping trusts working and in good shape should be a top priority for Active Directory Admins. While there is a couple of command in the Active Directory module Get-ADTrust, I thought I would try and write my own that checks a few more things. I want to thank Chris Dent for his input on the part of this command. His binary skills amaze me!

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.

It’s been less than 24 hours since I’ve released PSBlackListChecker with support, among other improvements, for Microsoft Teams and Slack and I’m now adding Discord to the mix. Discord was a popular request (well not really, just one person asked, but let’s pretend everyone loves PSBlackListChecker so much that they are too shy to ask for feature requests!).