Clatent

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Windows Server

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

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

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.

One-Liner Wednesday November 2, 2022

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Get-ADUser -filter {Enabled -eq $True -and PasswordNeverExpires -eq $False} –Properties "DisplayName", "msDS-UserPasswordExpiryTimeComputed" |
Select-Object -Property "Displayname",@{Name="ExpiryDate";Expression={[datetime]::FromFileTime($_."msDS-UserPasswordExpiryTimeComputed")}} | sort-object ExpiryDate

Here is a one liner that find very useful and hope you do to.

You can customize it even more, but for now this one grabs all the AD User accounts that are expiring and the ones expiring first at the top. I love using this to stay in front of users passwords expiring then they can’t connect or if they are off network and is a rush to get it done.

You could even sent this up as a scheduled task and have it pull the next 2 weeks of users. Then either you reach out to them, it emails them, or it notifies your help desk to reach out to them to help change their password.

Or you could have it in your dashboard so you’d always see the next 2 weeks of users passwords expiring.

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?