Working with VirusTotal from PowerShell

Since my website went down in fire with OVH SBG2, I used this occasion to publish my restored website via Cloudflare. It allows me to have to cache, minimization, and some additional security. One thing that caught my attention while browsing through Cloudflare settings was the Always Online feature based on web.archive.org. Basically, the concept is – whenever the website is down, Cloudflare would go and fetch content from web.archive.org.

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.

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’ve been in IT for a longer time now. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and misconfigurations. One of those misconfigurations was removing Authenticated Users from Security filtering in Group Policy Objects. While it worked fine at some point Microsoft rolled out a Hotfix MS16-07 on June 14th 2016.

I’ve been working today trying to deliver to one of my Clients Active Directory documentation. To my surprise, something that worked fine for a very long time has started to provide weird results. So, after spending about 8 hours taking apart a few of my PowerShell modules trying to find out what is wrong finally, I’ve found it: Export-CliXML / Import-CliXML. Those two commands are great. I’ve used them multiple times with great success (or so I thought).

I like OneDrive. It allows me to keep my data secure and always synchronized. If things go wrong, I can always get it back. I use it for almost everything. Even for my PowerShell projects, which are committed to GitHub, so in theory, I shouldn’t need that. But every once in a while, I make some stupid mistake and delete a file that has yet not been committed to GitHub, and that’s where the OneDrive comes in handy. Quick restore, and we’re back. Unfortunately, sometimes things aren’t as I would expect them to work. For example, let’s have a look at this nice list of markdown files that are documentation for my module called GPOZaurr.

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 time ago I’ve wrote PowerShell way to get all information about Office 365 Service Health, and if you were thinking that I would try the same concept for Azure Services you were right. However, I failed. This is because Office 365 Health can be gathered using Microsoft Graph API, and Azure Health information, as far as I know, is not available in the form I wanted it. Azure Status is available as part of Azure Status website. Contrary to Office 365 health you don’t have to login to your Office 365 tenant to read it.

When you write PowerShell modules, there’s a high chance you will have conflicts with either existing system commands (you should avoid that) or with someone else’s modules. There are also times when someone wants to use a private function from a module that only exports essential functions. Here’s a couple of ways how to deal with those scenarios.

Active Directory (AD) is crucial in managing identities and resources within an organization. Ensuring its health is pivotal for the seamless operation of various services. Today, I decided to look at Microsoft Entra Connect Health (Azure AD Connect Health) service, which allows monitoring Azure AD Connect, ADFS, and Active Directory. This means that under a single umbrella, you can have an overview of three services health. But is it worth it?