Clatent

Technology | Fitness | Food

Documentation

Module Monday January 23, 2023

by Leave a Comment

It’s already the 4th Monday in January, can you believe it? At least that means we get an extra Module Monday next week, but lets stick to this one for right now!

Enjoy Markdown, and want to generate markdown help for your existing module, or create markdown help for modules you are currently working on? PlatyPS is the module you need.

Supported scenarios:

  • Create Markdown
    • Using existing external help files (MAML schema, XML).
    • Using reflection
    • Using reflection and existing internal external help files.
    • For a single cmdlet
    • For an entire module
  • Update existing Markdown through reflection.
  • Create a module page .md with summary. It will also allow you to create updatable help cab.
  • Retrieve markdown metadata from markdown file.
  • Create external help xml files (MAML) from platyPS Markdown.
  • Create external help file cab
  • Preview help from generated maml file.

If any of that looks to be useful, definitely check out PlatyPS!

Github:
PlatyPS

Read-Only Friday November 18, 2022

by Leave a Comment

It’s coming to the end of the year and only a handful more ROF for this year, which can also mean agreements and renewals for a lot of people. How do you manage them? Do you have dedicated software, excel, sharepoint, SQL, or something else?

Do you have any automation built in for reminders to bring up to management, reminders for yourself, and/or request quotes from vendors? And yes I said for yourself, who enjoys renewing software then realizing you didn’t put in the new license and everything stops..

Going a little deeper, what about  cost wise? Do you have it so you can see upcoming costs and expected costs for the year. I know not all organizations are lucky enough to have enterprise grade software and/or dedicated departments to manage all of this. For smaller organizations, it can easily start out as an excel/sharepoint/google sheet and grow into local/cloud SQL or other scaleable solution. If you start now though, you’ll know what you want and don’t want which will make selecting solutions much easier. And from my years in the industry I can tell you that even with enterprise grade software you will still need to do some custom integrations, just a lot less of them.

Read-Only Friday October 28, 2022

by Leave a Comment

It’s Friday and the day for no major unplanned changes to your infrastructure.

How does your team share documentation between each other? Is it all in GitHub, Teams, Sharepoint, OneNote, Notion, ConnectWise, BookStack, etc? Or is it simple as word docs on a network share? Would you recommend the current way you are doing it?

If you use a combination, I’d love to hear the process of how you have it setup. If you prefer, you can message me, and I’ll do a summary of what everyone is using.

I know I have friends in all different size companies, curious to see how some of the solutions scale.

Module Monday October 24, 2022

by Leave a Comment

It’s Module Monday…

Although this module could be on Read-Only Friday, I wanted to show you that not all modules change your environment, and they can be extremely helpful getting information for you so you don’t have to create it or yourself. And with it being Cyber Security Month, why not have an easy way to find changes in your Active Directory.

With that said, today’s module is Jeff Hicks ADReportingTools, which I think the name is pretty obvious of what it does, but definitely check out the GitHub for all the reporting it can do. Here are a few of my favorites.

  • Get-ADDomainControllerHealth – this checks storage space, physical memory, % of security log in use, and critical services not running
  • Get-ADUserAudit – which will search the event logs on your domain controller for that specific user events
  • Get-ADGroupUser – which will display all users in that defined group and who any disabled users in red
  • Get-ADSiteSummary – shows a quick view of your sites and subnets
  • Show-DomainTree – this will show your domain in a tree view in your console
  • New-ADDomainReport – I really like this one, it shows you a nice html formatted report of your domain

Hope you take a look at it and if you see any features you’d like, let Jeff know.

PowerShell Gallery:

ADReportingTools/1.4.0

GitHub:
ADReportingTools

Read-Only Friday October 21, 2022

by Leave a Comment

It’s Friday, so you know what that means!

I like todays, because it’s another one of those it’s easy, but we either forget to check or believe it’s working but it may not be.

What is it? Event logging and dashboards. I’ll admit the dashboard part isn’t easy, but the event logging is. And I’m not just talking about your scripts(which you should be adding event logging to them when possible), I’m talking about any of your infrastructure that you manage. Even if you have alerting on, how do you know the alerting is actually working? Maybe your script or application you are using to go through the logs has an update but you don’t see it since you haven’t checked it in a month thinking it just works?

It’s always better to be proactive than reactive. Also while going through the logs you may find something else you want to start alerting for. Maybe you adding a new feature to your firewall or you added a print server and you want to setup alerting for those?

Hope you take out some time today and go through your logs, and if you’ve done that, do you have dashboards and/or alerting in place? If so, check those as well, and see if there is anyway you could improve it.

What scripts/modules/applications do you use to manage your event logs and/or create dashboards with?

Read-Only Friday October 14, 2022

by Leave a Comment

Todays selection is tough only because it’s so easy but we never do it…

Organize those repositories. Go through your GitHub, local drive, azure, or wherever else you keep your scripts and give them the once over to see what you still need to keep. Your future self will thank you. For one, it will be easier to find scripts and two, you may find a script you forgot you had that you needed for a recent project. Furthermore, you may review some of the code and see some quick updates that you can do or make the script more flexible or powerful( if it’s affects more than your computer or can’t be done in a test environment, I’d wait till Monday).

Schedule the time in now to make sure you do it, so the next time you or your coworkers take a look at the repositories, it a joy and not a game of Guess Who.