Richard Siddaway's Blog

As has been announced registration for the PowerShell Summit Europe 2015 opens on 27 February 2015. http://powershell.org/wp/2015/02/20/powershell-summit-europe-registration/   Other details on the Summit can be found here:  http://powershell.org/wp/community-events/summit/powershell-summit-europe-2015/   The agenda for the Summit can be found on the event site for the Summit http://eventmgr.azurewebsites.net/event/home/PSEU15

The PowerShell team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/02/13/new-and-improved-resource-kit.aspx details the new resources and bug fixes in wave 10 of the DSC resource kit. This is a much smaller release than the of late but includes new resources for initializing and formatting disks   IMPORTANT NOTE   One point in the “small print” is important to note. This is […]

The next release (wave 10) of the Desired State Resource Kit is available. You can download the whole of the resource kit from https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/DSC-Resource-Kit-All-c449312d This version includes the IIS resources that were missing in wave 9

A new preview of Windows Management Framework 5.0 (PowerShell) is available.   See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/02/18/windows-management-framework-5-0-preview-february-2015-is-now-available.aspx for details.   The release notes indicate which new features are considered stable and which are still regarded as experimental and therefore subject to change.   Downloads are available for Windows 8.1 (x32 and x64), Windows Server 2012 R2  Windows 2012. […]

A question came up on the forum about copying files with CIM (WMI). I normally use Copy-Item rather than CIM as its easier. The questioner was using CIM_LogicalFile when I’ve normally used CIM_DataFile so I decided to take a look at the class. In reality the two classes are very similar and CIM-datafile could be […]

My test lab is a set of virtual machines running on a Lenovo w1510 laptop. When I’ve finished working for the day I want to shut down the virtual machines and the laptop. I may have anywhere between 2 and 8 (or more) VMs running so scripting the shutdown helps a lot.   Machines can […]

I thought that using a workflow with its foreach –parallel construct would be a good way to test AD replication.   I found that I got double the results – the foreach seemed to go to each machine twice.   Eventually decided to perform the task sequentially Get-ADDomainController -Filter * | foreach {   Get-ADReplicationUpToDatenessVectorTable […]

I was recently asked a question about typing variables after thinking about it came up with this demonstration. Create a variable with an integer value £> $a = 2 £> $a.GetType() IsPublic IsSerial Name ——– ——– —- True     True     Int32   AS you would expect – you get an integer type. If you do this […]

I was left a question on this post – https://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2762&action=edit Asking how to modify the PO Box value for a user account.    This attribute can be set on the Address tab of AD Users and Computers but isn’t directly visible through AD Administrative Center.   The first trick is to discover the real name […]

I use WSUS in my lab to update machines – means I only have to download updates once. The issue is that I have to start the VMs so they can communicate with the WSUS server. WSUS will start to flag warnings if machines haven’t contacted the WSUS server for more than that length of […]