Richard Siddaway's Blog

Save the date -  11 January 2011  7.30 GMT   UK PowerShell User group presents a Live Meeting with Ed Wilson – THE Scripting Guy. Ed will be talking about:  Windows PowerShell Best Practices Learn Windows PowerShell best practices as they apply to each stage of the script development lifecycle. See the differences between working […]

My publisher, Manning, have a 35-50% off offer running on ebooks between now and 1 December – check out www.manning.com PowerShell in Practice for Christmas makes a great idea

If you are looking for Visio stencils – especially of a technical nature – check out Visio cafe – – http://www.visiocafe.com/

PowerShell Admin Modules 0.4 is now available.  This adds a PAMSysInfo module to the download that includes the following functions: Get-BIOSInfo Get-Bus Get-CDROM Get-ComputerSystem Get-CPU Get-MemIrq Get-OSInfo Get-PageFile Get-System Get-TimeZone Get-SystemInfo is a top level function that calls the others for a full system information dump.  All functions take a computer name as their only […]

Spent the last two evenings trying to install and configure SC VMM.  Total failure.  Kept getting an error about not being able to connect to the agent on the host – this is after the initial failure of trying to install SC VMM on the host. Nothing worked for me – its odd as we’ve […]

I’ve added another module to the PSAM project on codeplex. Version 0.3 now has: PAMShares – for working with shares PAMMath – for working with binary and hex PAMEnv – for working with environmental variables The modules can be downloaded from http://psam.codeplex.com/ Enjoy

Lets round off looking at environmental variables by looking at how to remove them 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 function remove-environment { param (  [string][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$name,  [switch]$perm,  [switch]$machine ) $value = "" if (-not $perm) {Remove-Item -Path env:\$($name) -Force} else {  if ($machine){$type = "Machine"}  else {$type = "User"}  [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($name, $value, $type) } }   If you want to remove it permanently use the –perm switch otherwise […]

This is similar to creating them. 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 function set-environment { param (  [string][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$name,  [string][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$value,  [switch]$perm,  [switch]$machine )  if (-not $perm) {Set-Item -Path env:\$($name) -Value $($value)}  else {   if ($machine){$type = "Machine"}   else {$type = "User"}   [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($name, $value, $type)  }    Get-Item -Path env:\$($name) }   We use the same variables as when creating a variable.  If […]

A few months ago I started work on a follow up to PowerShell in Practice – http://www.manning.com/siddaway/ . This book will also be published by Manning. It covers PowerShell and WMI.  These two powerful technologies work well together to give a superb environment for managing your systems. WMI has had a bit of  a bad […]

PowerShell in Practice is now available in mobi and epub formats for use on Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader etc etc If you have a copy of the book you should be getting emailed about the availability of these new formats.  Otherwise check out http://www.manning.com/catalog/mobile/