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One-Liner Wednesday November 30, 2022

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It’s already Wednesday, can you believe it? Nothing crazy initially from today’s one liner, but once you learn the concepts, your imagination is the limit.

# Local Computer

(gcim Win32_OperatingSystem).LastBootUpTime

# Remote Computer

$s = new-cimsession -computername comp1,comp2 -credential credential

(gcim Win32_OperatingSystem -CimSession $s).LastBootTime

**GCIM is an alias for Get-CimInstance

So what does all of this mean? The first script will give you the last time your local computer booted up, and the second one does it for a remote computer. This is a great one liner(technically 2 for the remote as you need to create the CimSession) for you or your support team to make sure the user has really restarted their computer. Also a great way to check if a script you have that is supposed to reboot the device actually reboots it, and to not go any farther until the reboot has actually happened. I’d recommend having this one liner in your toolbox as well as creating a function out of it so that you can put parameter’s in place to make it even easier for your support team to use.

You also can see that I created a CimSession for the remote computer(s). This makes connecting to remote computers much easier and allow you to scale when needing information from CIM commands.

There is just so much information that you can get from the CimInstances and CimClass, that I can’t put here, but if you are looking for any thing related to hardware to a device check out these out. You can even see how much battery charge is left in a computer.

Get-CimInstance:
Microsoft Learn

Get-CimSession:
Microsoft Learn

CIM Classes:
Microsoft Learn

Module Monday November 28, 2022

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Hope all of my US friends had a good holiday! Now it’s Monday and we are back for another Module Monday. This is an important one, as it Is currently replacing a couple other modules as they are being depreciated. The 2 that are being depreciated are AzureAD and MSOnline if you didn’t know already. I’d check your scripts if you are still using them and convert them sooner than later.

So what is replacing these 2 modules? MS Graph, which doesn’t completely replace all the functionality as easily as we would like, but Microsoft is adding more features to it. This is how you will get license counts, Azure AD information, Teams, Exchange, Outlook, and any other 365 applications.

Also a great thing with Microsoft Graph is that it is cross-platform on PowerShell 7 and above so it doesn’t matter if you are using macOS, Linux, or Windows. You can still use it on Windows PowerShell 5.1 too.

PowerShell Gallery:

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Microsoft.Graph/1.17.0

Microsoft Documentation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/microsoftgraph/overview?view=graph-powershell-1.0

Read-Only Friday November 25, 2022

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I know a lot of US workers have off today, but still wanted to post something as I know there are still many working and others who may have a little extra free time for learning. For today’s ROF, it really is a module or should I say modules, but the solution from these modules could be so helpful, I didn’t want someone to miss it.

The creator is called AsBuiltReport, which they have designed As Built Reports for different software and systems which you can customize what you want to see on the report and what thresholds should be for pass/fail.

Another way I could see using this to do to monthly/weekly/daily checks on your systems, and see if anything has been changed, but not only that, for certain(or all) systems it automatically changes back to the standard settings that it should be.

GitHub:

https://github.com/AsBuiltReport

One-Liner Wednesday November 23, 2022

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As we are approaching the holiday season  at the end of the year, dates are very important. Everything from counting down the days to the new year to creating those end of the year reports.

With that said, how many times have you had to create a report for the previous month, but it’s  parameters are only StartDate and EndDate? Now, you have to remember how many days are in that month and consider if it’s a leap year or not. And sometimes the first of the month is on a weekend, Holiday, or a day you took PTO so you have to make sure your code doesn’t just go back 30 days as then it may or may not get the whole previous month.  And let’s say for reasons you can’t control,  you can’t have it as a scheduled task to always run on the first of the month?

This one liner(technically 2 one for StartDate and one for EndDate), is the solution you need. It will check which month your in, go to the previous month then find the first and last day of that month. That’s it!

$StartDate = (Get-Date -Day 1).AddMonths(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")

$EndDate = (Get-Date -Day 1).AddDays(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")

If you wanted the past 6 months you could change the -1 to -6 in Start Date. Now you don’t have to manually enter the month date range every time you need a report for the previous month. You could set this as the default parameter, but give yourself the option to change it if you need a different date range.

Documentation:

Get-Date:
Microsoft Learn

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.