Clatent

Technology | Fitness | Food

Reporting

Read-Only Friday August 4, 2023 End Of Life Server 2012R2 and managing EOL

by Leave a Comment

Read-Only Friday August 4, 2023

Do you still have any Windows Server 2012R2 or earlier in production? This is a friendly reminder that they will be going End Of Life October 10 of this year. If you do have any in production, what is your plan to decommission them? Do you still need the server, or will you be spinning up a new upgraded VM? Do you have the licensing to upgrade? What are your next steps?

Talking about End Of Life, how do you manage and track your equipment and licensing for this scenario? Do you have special asset/license management software, SharePoint list, SQL Database, Excel workbook, or even a csv with dates and costs?

If you’ve made it this far, I’m hoping this isn’t a surprise and this is only a reminder to keep following your plan, but if this is the first time you’re hearing this, please look at this now and put a plan in place, especially if you will need to purchase new licensing. While you are at it, I’d check those servers running 2012R2 and see how much of the services you really need running now, as a lot has probably changed since you first put them into production. Also, do you have enough resources to run both at the same time, or do you have to take a current backup(test to make sure the backup works), delete(or turn off and hope you don’t accidently turn it on while new server is on) your current 2012R2, then build the new on?

Good luck with your migrations and as always if there is anyway I can help, feel free to reach out! Have a great Friday, and remember no unscheduled changes today.

One-Liner Wednesday July 26, 2023

by 1 Comment

Ever needed to check a computer or server and see how much disk space is being used? It could be for multiple reasons such as are any disks too low on space, too much available space assigned(think VMs where you need storage for a new server, but assume all of your storage is tied up), or you just need to see drives that have more than a certain amount of free space due to company standards.

This little one-liner is a great template for you then. This one liner will show any drive on the current computer that has more than 30gb of space free. You could easily change the “-gt” to “-lt” and only show drives with less than 30gb of space free.

Get-PSDrive -PSProvider 'FileSystem' | Where-Object { ($_.Free / 1GB) -gt 30 } | Format-Table -AutoSize

I know your thinking, I can easily click on my computer and check hard drive space, but what about if you have 10, 100, or 1000+ devices you have to manage? Do you really want to do all of those clicks? You could even set this up as a scheduled task and have it notify you, send to teams/discord/etc, or even email a Distribution List with a report. That sounds like a lot better idea than wasting time clicking around.

If your curious on how to have this capture multiple computers, one way is:

$Computers = 'Computer1', 'Computer2', 'Computer3'  # Replace with your computer names or IPs

$ScriptBlock = {
    Get-PSDrive -PSProvider 'FileSystem' | 
    Where-Object { ($_.Free / 1GB) -gt 30 } | 
    Format-Table -AutoSize
}

foreach ($Computer in $Computers) {
    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $Computer -ScriptBlock $ScriptBlock
}

I hope you found this one-liner useful, and would love to hear how you use it or have used it in the past! And as always if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and if I can’t help you out, and I can find someone that can.

Read-Only Friday 365 Developer Program

by Leave a Comment

Want to have some fun with Office 365, but don’t want to mess up your production environment? Or what about being able to try out scripts and not having to brace yourself as you run them and hope they don’t clear out all your data? Now you can do whatever you want with the Microsoft 365 Dev Center.

That is right, up to 25 E5 licensed users at your disposal for 90 days and will be renewed as long as you are using it. They will even create 16 users for you, mail traffic, and more. This isn’t just for PowerShell, this all aspects of 365.

Awesome, right? Here are few examples:

  1. You could copy up to 25 of your current users and import them into this Developer tenant and test scripts see exactly how it would work with your information. Think of those times where you test a script with fictional users and your script works perfect, but once you put it into production, your script fails because one username had a character that your test data didn’t have. Now your spending unnecessary time trying to figure out what went wrong when it worked perfectly in proof of concept.
  2. You want to test new features or policies, but you don’t want to enable them in your production environment, as your not 100% sure how it will react to your environment. Configure this test environment how your current tenant is then enable those features or policies you want to test. Much safer to test in the dev environment, then do it in production and all of a sudden your users can’t access critical resources or anything at all!
  3. Your boss wants you do a proof of concept on how to streamline the onboarding process and to make it as simple as possible for the organization. It is recommended that you use Sharepoint and Teams as the company already uses both and are familiar. Instead of using your production environment, you can do this all in the dev tenant without affecting anything in production. You can even invite key players in this project to login and test it with you. Now you don’t have to worry about a teams alert that you setup for when a new hire has been added to AD or Microsoft Entra ID spamming a your production channel because your script or flow errored.

These are just a few scenarios that the 365 Dev tenant can be useful, but there are so many more. I’m barely scratching the surface, and hope you sign up right away for this if you haven’t already. It is free, if you administer or develop 365, you need this.

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions, I’d be glad to help out in anyway I can.

Sign up for the Microsoft 365 Dev Center

One-Liner Wednesday March 29, 2023

by 2 Comments

Can you believe it’s Wednesday already? I can’t either, week is flying by. Could it be the excitement of the PowerShell + Devops Global Summit coming up in a few weeks? Quite possibly! If you haven’t gotten your ticket yet, I highly recommend it. With that said, these next 3 weeks I’ll be highlighting speakers and topics from the summit.

Today’s one-liner is a great one for troubleshooting from Jeff Hicks. He will be heading the Onramp program for attendees who are just getting into IT. It is such a great program and wished it was around when I was getting into IT!

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{Logname = 'System';Level=1} -MaxEvents 10 | sort-Object ProviderName,TimeCreated

What this one-liner does is searches the System Event Log for the last 10 “Critical” events. Then sorts them by the Provider name and date/time. You could change the level for “lesser” events if needed. Also if you need to check on a remote computer you can add the -ComputerName parameter, but remember that it only takes 1 computer at a time. If you need to connect to multiple computers, you can use ForEach to reach out to all computers needed.

Hope this one-liner helps you out and hope to see you at the PowerShell + DevOps Summit!

Jeff Hicks:
Blog

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit:
Global Summit

Microsoft Learn:
Get-WinEvent

Module Monday March 20, 2023

by Leave a Comment

Hope you had a great weekend, and are ready for today’s Module Monday. Are you using Duo security? Or looking at Duo for your company? Then you need this module. It’s called DuoSecurity.

Why not automate the process of onboarding/terminating employees or removing old phone authenticators? What about reporting on who is in which groups, how many phones they have, or filtering event logs?

So many more things to automate with this module and make your life easier as well as make your company more secure.

If you have used this module before, let me know how you are using it.

PowerShell Gallery:
Duo Security

GitHub:
Duo Security

Read-Only Friday March 10, 2023

by Leave a Comment

It’s Friday, and I’m going to keep this one short in sweet copy. I’ve mentioned this module before, but it is so helpful if you use any of the products, that I want to make sure you don’t miss out on it! Yes, I know it’s Read-Only Friday, but this module will step up your documentation game ten fold.

AsBuiltReport on Github or you can find them on asbuiltreport.com.

What they have created is multiple modules depending on the product you need documentation on, and with one quick line of code, you get a full breakdown of the product you requesting information on. How about a 144 page document on your Active Directory? Not bad, right?

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

GitHub:
https://github.com/AsBuiltReport

Website:
https://www.asbuiltreport.com/