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Module Monday October 24, 2022

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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

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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?

One-Liner Wednesday October 19, 2022

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New-TenantAllowBlockListItems -ListType Sender -Block -Entries emailaddress

Here is a super useful one liner that has come in handy more recently.

What this does is adds a user or domain to the tenant block list as it’s written below. If you need to add someone to the allow list, you can change -Block to -Allow. You can even change set a duration for both Blocking and Allowing.

Command:
New-TenantAllowBlockListItems

Example with Parameters:

Add-365Blocklist

Module Monday October 17, 2022

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It’s Module Monday!

I’ve recently found this module, and so glad I did as it’s a great module to add to the collection. Evergreen, helps you download installer packages for your apps, directly from the supported apps official site, all at once or one by one if you need to. How nice would it be if you knew the app you were deploying was the newest version every time you went to deploy it? Another great feature of it is you can download the exact version you need as well, so you don’t have the delete unwanted versions or having to make sure coworkers don’t deploy the wrong version.

Definitely check out this module and if you can add more applications the whole community would be grateful… it does already have a lot of apps!

Website:
Evergreen

PowerShell Gallery:
Evergreen

Read-Only Friday October 14, 2022

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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.

Module Monday October 10, 2022

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It’s time for Module Monday….

Share Code not Secrets, I think says it best.  I guess you probably want the name of the module now…It’s called PSSecretScanner which will search files/folders that you point it too and check if there are any passwords visible! Maybe you have some old code that you haven’t used in awhile, you might want to run this on it just to make sure younger you who may have been more naïve didn’t leave any plain text passwords! We’ve all been there!

PowerShell Gallery:
PSSecretScanner/1.0.9