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Viewing articles tagged 'PowerShell'

PowerShell Gallery: Installing and Updating Modules Safely A financial services client called us after a junior admin ran Install-Module on a domain controller during a maintenance window. The module pulled a dependency chain… Working with YAML in PowerShell Using powershell-yaml The ticket said a scheduled DSC pull job was failing on three of seven nodes. Twenty minutes of log reading later, the pattern was obvious: every failure node deserial… PowerShell Remoting Auth: Kerberos vs NTLM vs CredSSP A managed customer paged us last quarter. Their nightly PowerShell job hit a remote file server, then tried to copy from a third box. It failed every single night with… PowerShell REST API Calls with Invoke-RestMethod: A Practical Guide While working on a monitoring integration for a logistics client, I got an idea for a small helper script that would pull ticket counts from their ITSM API every 15 mi… PowerShell Providers: Navigate the Registry Like a Filesystem A managed services client called us at 2 AM because a fleet of 180 Windows Server 2022 boxes had stopped autoloading their LOB agent after a botched GPO push. The Powe… Invoke-Command at Scale: PowerShell Across 200 Servers A client with 212 Windows servers across four regions asked us to push a single time zone correction before a quarterly close. Their previous vendor had quoted two eng… Packaging Non-MSI Apps for Intune Win32 Deployment A logistics client called us in a panic. Their helpdesk was burning 12 hours a week walking users through manual installs of a vendor accounting tool that shipped as a… Creating Enforced Authentication Policies in Active Directory It was 03:14 when the SOC at one of our financial services clients flagged a Tier 0 admin credential authenticating from a workstation in the call center VLAN. The acc… Reading and Writing Windows Registry with PowerShell After the third failed login script rollout in a single quarter, a financial services client brought us in to clean up their configuration management. The previous MSP… PowerShell OutBuffer: How Pipeline Buffering Actually Works We had a client whose nightly reconciliation script was melting a SQL server every night around 3AM. The script pulled roughly 40,000 objects from an API and shoved ea… PowerShell Select-Object: Master Object Properties Fast One of our managed services clients had a junior admin exporting process lists to Excel, then deleting columns by hand. Every morning. For compliance evidence. That is… PowerShell Module Manifest: Versioning and Dependencies Post-Mortem The pager went off at 03:17. A managed client’s nightly reporting job had failed across 40 endpoints. The error was short: The specified module 'ReportKit' was not loa… PolicyStore in NetIPsec Cmdlets: Local vs Domain Policies A financial services client called us on a Friday afternoon because half their branch office servers had stopped accepting inbound connections after a Group Policy upd… PowerShell Variables: Scope, Types, and Best Practices Last month we inherited a 3,000-line PowerShell deployment script from a manufacturing client. The thing was riddled with global variables bleeding into functions, typ… PowerShell WMI Service Management: Query, Start, Stop Three months ago, a client with a fleet of 120 Windows Server nodes across four branch offices came to us with a recurring problem: their print spooler services were c… PowerShell JEA: Restricting Remote Admin Access It was 11 PM on a Tuesday when the SIEM flagged a credential harvesting alert on a domain controller. Someone had launched Mimikatz from a PowerShell remoting session… Configuring AD Audit Policies with PowerShell and GPO Last year, a mid-size logistics company we manage came to us after discovering that a domain admin account had been compromised for over three weeks. The attacker used… AD Server Parameter: FQDN vs NetBIOS Name Explained While scripting a bulk user migration for a client last quarter, I hit one of those issues that wastes an hour before you realize what happened. Half the Get-ADUser ca… PowerShell Module Management: Install, Import, and Update A client called us on a Monday morning because half their admin team couldn’t run Exchange management commands. The other half could. Same servers, same accounts, same… Automating ODBC DSN Management with PowerShell Remove-OdbcDsn The ticket read: “Application can’t connect to the database.” After remoting into the server, I ran Get-OdbcDsn and found seventeen ODBC data source names — eight of w… PowerShell For, ForEach, and While Loops Explained Last quarter we inherited a client environment with 140 Windows servers. The previous admin had been manually checking disk space on each one. Every. Single. Morning… Monitoring Disk Space and Sending Alerts with PowerShell Last quarter, one of our managed customers had a file server hit 99% disk utilization on a Saturday night. The application logs stopped writing, their ERP system threw… Automate Network Captures: Start and Stop-NetEventSession The call came in at 11pm. A manufacturing client had intermittent network drops hitting their production floor — three times in two weeks, no pattern, no clear cause… Backing Up and Restoring Group Policy Objects with PowerShell After inheriting a manufacturing client’s Active Directory environment from another vendor last year, the first thing we discovered was that their Group Policy Objects… Bulk Import Data into SharePoint 2016 Lists with PowerShell A client came to us mid-migration last year with a familiar problem. They had 11 SharePoint lists and roughly 3,000 rows of legacy data sitting in CSV exports. Their p… Encoding Passwords Securely in PowerShell Enterprise Scripts Last year we inherited a managed environment from another vendor—a mid-size logistics company running 40+ scheduled PowerShell scripts across their domain controllers… PowerShell NetIPsec Module: IPsec Policies on Server 2025 We were brought in after a healthcare provider’s internal audit flagged something alarming: a credential-harvesting tool had been sitting quietly on a domain controlle… PowerShell ThrottleLimit: Optimizing Concurrent Network Operations Three hundred endpoints. One script. A network switch gasping under the load. We inherited exactly this situation from a previous vendor during an engagement with a mi… SharePoint 2016 Site Collection Admin Audit: PowerShell Checklist A manufacturing client came to us eighteen months after their SharePoint 2016 farm went live. They had grown from two site collections to sixty-three. Their IT team ha… Using the PowerShell Certificate Provider for Cert Management It is 3 AM. Your SIEM is generating Kerberos pre-authentication failures across 47 workstations. You escalate to Tier 3 and begin triage. The answer is not malware, no… Windows Admin Center: Browser-Based Server Management Done Right Last year, a logistics client with fourteen Windows Server instances across two sites called us in a panic — their lone sysadmin had left, and nobody else knew how to… Add-NetEventPacketCaptureProvider: PowerShell Packet Capture A financial services client we support had intermittent TCP resets appearing on a Windows Server 2022 application node. No packet analyzer on the box, and getting appr… New-NetEventSession: Network Event Capture in PowerShell The call came in on a Tuesday morning. A financial services firm we support had been logging intermittent packet loss across their Hyper-V cluster for three weeks. The… PowerShell -AsJob: Run Long Network Tasks Without the Wait A managed services client we support runs a Windows environment across three sites — roughly 400 endpoints. Their network team had a PowerShell script that pinged ever… InterfaceAlias vs InterfaceDescription: Targeting NICs in PowerShell A healthcare client came to us after a PowerShell script someone wrote six months earlier started throwing errors across 40 Windows Server boxes. The script targeted n… IPsec Main Mode Crypto Sets: PowerShell Hardening Guide A financial services client we took on last year had been running IPsec between their domain controllers and application servers for three years. Solid concept. The ex… Set-NetIPsecMainModeCryptoSet: Enforce IKE Encryption in PowerShell During a network security review for a logistics company we took over last year, we pulled their Windows Server 2025 IPsec policy and found the main mode crypto set ne… Get-NetAdapterRsc: Configure Receive Segment Coalescing in PowerShell A financial services client called us last spring with a familiar complaint. Their Windows Server 2025 nodes were bleeding throughput under sustained traffic loads — C… PowerShell CimSession: Remote Network Cmdlets at Scale We got called in after a client’s previous MSP left them with no documentation and no standardized network adapter configuration across their server fleet. Forty-three… Windows Server Hardening: Stop Guessing, Start Baselining We inherited an environment last year where the client had been running Windows Server 2019 domain controllers with NTLMv1 still enabled, SMBv1 wide open, and zero Gro… DevSecOps Best Practices: A Pipeline Walkthrough During an incident response engagement last year, we pulled the deployment logs for a mid-sized financial services company and found something that should have stopped… Managing RDMA NICs with PowerShell NetAdapter in Windows Server 2025 Three months into a major storage infrastructure refresh for a financial services client, we hit an unexpected bottleneck. Their SQL Server cluster was saturating CPU… Microsoft Teams Administration: Beyond the Admin Center A financial services client we support had a compliance audit scheduled for Q3. Their Teams environment had grown from a pandemic-era rollout of 200 users to a product… PowerShell Automation Readiness Audit for IT Teams I used to spend two hours every Friday manually reviewing scripts before they hit production. Scan for error handling. Check the logging. Run through a mental list of… How to Manage DNS and DHCP: IT Admin Complete Guide Related reading: GitHub Discussions: Community Engagement for IT Teams | IT Auditing in the Age of AI, IoT, and Zero Trust | Citrix NetScaler: Complete Admin Guide for… Managing Active Directory Objects: A Complete Guide Managing Active Directory objects is the core administrative task for any Windows domain environment. AD objects – including users, computers, groups, and contacts – f… PowerShell Parameters, Validation & Dynamic Parameters Related reading: PowerShell Automation Readiness Audit for IT Teams | PowerShell Scripts, Functions, and Script Blocks Guide How to Raise the Active Directory Forest Functional Level Raising the Active Directory forest functional level is one of those tasks that many administrators either delay indefinitely or rush through without adequate preparat… PowerShell Scripts, Functions, and Script Blocks Guide PowerShell scripts, functions, and script blocks are the three core building blocks of IT automation for system administrators. Knowing which to use – and how to struc…
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