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Module Monday November 21, 2022

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Since I know everyone knows about Microsoft’s Hyper-V PowerShell, and I’ve mentioned about VMWare’s here, I didn’t want to leave out Nutanix’s PowerShell module for those that use Nutanix. I personally haven’t used this one, but the documentation looks great for it, and you can definitely automate a lot of the processes instead of having to go into the GUI. I’d also recommend creating standard templates of how settings should be for hosts and VM’s which you could then compare with how yours are setup, so you can quickly see what has changed. This is great for a few reasons. 1) You have a base working config saved for future deployments 2) If a bad actor gets in and slowly starts changing things you can catch it 3) You can create reports based off this data.

And if you looking for a great “As Built” Report for your Nutanix, check out the link below where they have created a detailed report with the ability to highlight concerning areas from just running one script!

Nutanix CLI:
PowerShell Gallery

As Built Report – Nutanix
PowerShell Gallery – As Built Report Nutanix

Read-Only Friday November 18, 2022

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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.

One-Liner Wednesday November 16, 2022

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Always love when you get surprised by printer issues? Here is a one liner that in its current state works great, but can be expanded on to be even more powerful, or gives you an idea to go more in depth.

 invoke-command -computername ServerName -credential YourUser  -scriptblock {get-printer | select-object name, printerstatus, portname}

This code will connect to your print server or user computer and check all printers installed and their status. It’s not limited to one computer for situations where you have multiple printer servers or need to check on multiple user computers. It will even show when toner and paper jams. Wouldn’t it be nice to see if the user is even connected to the printer they are trying to print to or if the printer is saying there is a paper jam?

To go a step farther, you could set this up as a scheduled task or have it monitor, and send a toast notification, create a ticket depending on the error, or send a chat message to your teams/discord/slack channel. To go even more granular, you could connect to the printer’s API and check toner levels, and have it order that toner when it hits the pre-determined threshold.

Hoping this little one liner helps out, and gives you some more ideas on how you can expand on it, to make your lives easier. If you have a related script, please post it in the comments for more ideas.

PowerShell Help:
Get-Printer

Module Monday November 14, 2022

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I’ll just cut to the chase on this one.. Whose tired of patching windows computers?

Here is a great tool to make it much less painful…

Welcome Chrissy Lemaire’s KBUpdate. This module will allow you to patch your computer, workstations, and servers. They don’t even need to be online either, as you can save the updates to a USB, DVD, or a network path.

A really cool feature is you can force it to where to look for the updates as well.

And this isn’t just for installing, you are able to remove updates as well.

Hope this saves you as much time as it has me!

PowerShell Gallery:
kbupdate/2.0.18

GitHub:
kbupdate

Read-Only Friday Nov 11, 2022

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With today being a holiday, and more holidays coming up in the last days of the year, send out reminders to your users to keep be extra careful when clicking on links. Attacks have been more minor so far this year, which makes me feel it’s going to ramp up shortly. For the parents, think of it when your child is quiet for too long by themselves… it usually means they are planning something or doing something they shouldn’t be doing. That’s how I feel about bad actors currently.

  • A few things to remind them:
    • Do you normally get emails from that company service? (ie UPS, FedEx, PayPal, etc)
      • If not, don’t open it, and definitely don’t click on links or download an attachment
    • Does that person normally send you links to click on? If they do, are they the type the current email is asking you to open?
      • I’ve seen it before when a company you normally work with gets compromised so spam/virus/malware protection doesn’t pick it up as it is coming from a real email, but the bad actor over took that users account and is sending links/attachments from it.
    • Is the email the real identities email?
      • I know the name says it’s your president or CFO, but what is the real email sending it? It can be tougher seeing it quickly on a mobile device, but have them double check. Have them check those headers.
    • Don’t respond to the email
      • When responding, you are showing them that the account is live, and they will keep on attempting to compromise that email address.
    • If it looks real, contact the person/company from known number
      • If the email looks mostly real, but they don’t normally send you links, call the person/company from a known number. Nothing from that current email. If you normally contact them check previous emails or ask a coworker if they have a direct number. I would say check their website, but that could be compromised as well, so not always the best spot to get their number.

I’m sure all of these are pretty common, but it’s a great reminder for your users, especially with the end of the year rush starts happening.

What are some tips you would give to your end users?

One-Liner Wednesday Nov 9, 2022

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This is an oldie, but a goodie…

Unlock-ADAccount -Identity "UserName"

If you haven’t used this, and didn’t know it existed, definitely add it to your tool box. It’s so much easier than having to go into the GUI to do this.

A nice future script you could have this in is if you have multiple users get locked out, that you could pipe Get-ADUser for the group you want and filter it so only disabled show and either unlock all of them, or pipe it to Out-GridView with passthrough. This would give you a nice gridview of the users and the ones you select from it would be disabled.