.The Dot Source

Handling Objects not Found in Active Directory

The Active Directory module for PowerShell has been around for a very long time now, and it’s even still an OG Windows PowerShell module. I noted some interesting behaviour on some recent work I wanted to share.

Off Topic: An Interesting SQL Query

It is likely that many of us working in the automation space and/or working with PowerShell will need to write SQL queries. We aren’t SQL developers by any means, but we do what we can to get by. When developing a recent piece of automation I ended up writing this query that I thought demonstrated a useful technique.

PowerShell 7.4 Persistent Web Sessions

PowerShell 7.4 snuck in an interesting new feature for it’s web CMDlets, “Support HTTP persistent connections in Web Cmdlets”. This brings some very useful performance benefits that I’ll demonstrate with a quick test in this post.

Preparing for a PowerShell Interview

My PowerShell experience has been gained in roles that typically have a mash of other infrastructure skills, Hyper-V, vSphere, all things Windows (and sometimes Linux). It is not often you see dedicated PowerShell development roles come along, like you do with Python for instance. Last year I had the opportunity to apply for such a role which got me thinking that it could be a good topic for a blog article.

VUMXtra 1.3 Update

VMWare Update Manager has been officially deprecated as of 8.0 and honestly I wasn’t expecting to be doing much more with VUMXtra since it’s last release. However here we are with VUMXtra 1.3 with some significant changes. Read on to find out more.

Module Overhaul: tds-vRops

In the automation world, we have a tendency to touch on a particular product or technology then move on to something else. I did a bit of work on vRops a while back now, and having circled back around to it recently it was time to update the module and add some new functions relating to what I was doing. Read on to see what’s new.

ESXi NTP Configuration with PowerShell

As part of a recent automation workflow, I had cause to configure NTP on ESXi hosts. I honestly thought this would be easier than it was, but a couple of issues led me to “roll my own” function which I’m sharing here.

Native TAR File Extraction with PowerShell

That’s right, tar-ball 😉

On one of my projects recently, I had cause to extract a .tar.gz file during the automation process. If you are in this scenario there are potentially a couple of options around this which I’ll cover off. However, I wanted a simple, native function with no dependencies, so keep reading to see what I’ve come up with.

Building ISO Files with PowerShell 7

A function that’s been part of my toolkit for a long time is New-ISOFile by Chris Wu. This excellent little function allowed you to build an ISO file directly from PowerShell, even a bootable one.

I came to use it recently on an automation project with PowerShell 7 and discovered there was some compatibility issue that prevented it from working. I noticed that the original Technet site that the function came from originally is now gone, so I considered this an opportunity for some code review and hopefully produce a revised function that works with PowerShell 7.

ESXi & The Big MAC Mystery

A scripting “opportunity” came up this week. Apparently ESXi assigns a virtual (or “shadow”) MAC address to each of its physical adapters, over and above the native physical MAC. The request was to report on all of these MACs across a large number of hosts. Read on to see how this resulted in the Get-esxiShadowMAC function.