Richard Siddaway's Blog

Today is SysAdmin day – http://sysadminday.com/   Time to show your appreciation for the people who keep your computing going

.psd1 files are usually used as module manifests You can test the manifest PS>  Test-ModuleManifest -Path ‘C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\Pester\3.4.0\Pester.psd1’ | fl Name              : Pester Path              : C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\Pester\3.4.0\Pester.psd1 Description       : Pester provides a framework for running BDD style Tests to execute and validate PowerShell commands inside of PowerShell and offers a powerful set of Mocking Functions […]

One of the new items in PowerShell 5.1 is the Get-ComputerInfo cmdlet PS>  Get-Command Get-ComputerInfo -Syntax Get-ComputerInfo [[-Property] <string[]>] [<CommonParameters>]   PS>  Get-ComputerInfo WindowsBuildLabEx                                       : 14393.0.amd64fre.rs1_release.160715-1616 WindowsCurrentVersion                                   : 6.3 WindowsEditionId                                        : Professional WindowsInstallationType                                 : Client WindowsInstallDateFromRegistry                          : 19/07/2016 12:27:55 WindowsProductId                                        : XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX WindowsProductName                                      : Windows 10 Pro WindowsRegisteredOrganization                           : WindowsRegisteredOwner                                  : XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX WindowsSystemRoot                                       : C:\WINDOWS […]

Windows 10 shipped with PowerShell 5.0 installed. The latest preview builds, and presumably, next months anniversary update have had PowerShell 5.1. Windows 2016 TP5 also ships with PowerShell 5.1 A PowerShell 5.1 preview is now available for Windows 7, 8.1, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2 Details from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2016/07/16/announcing-windows-management-framework-wmf-5-1-preview/

Deal of the Day July 23: Half off my book Windows PowerShell in Action, Third Edition. Use code dotd072316au at http://bit.ly/2afnOPj   Deal of the Day details at https://www.manning.com/dotd

In response to this post – https://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/copy-files-over-ps-remoting-sessions/   I was asked how you could copy files in parallel to multiple machines.   As soon as anyone mentions parallelism I think of workflows so I ended up with this $computers = ‘W16TP5TGT01’, ‘W16TP5TGT02’ workflow parallelcopy {   param ([string[]]$computername)   foreach -parallel ($computer in $computername) { […]

Deal of the Day July 19: Half off my book Learn Active Directory Management in a Month of Lunches. Use code dotd071916au at http://bit.ly/2a8jroO   For more information on Manning’s Deal of the Day see -  https://www.manning.com/dotd.

The imminent arrival of PowerShell 5.1 in the Windows 10 Anniversary update (assumption as the Windows 10 Insider previews have been showing PowerShell 5.1 for some time) and Windows Server 2016 (TP5 shows PowerShell 5.1) and the fact that PowerShell was officially released to the world 10 years ago come November started me thinking about […]

Looks like we’re set for some summer goodies over the next few months.   First up is Windows 10 anniversary update that’s due 2 August https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/07/12/windows-10-anniversary-sdk-preview-build-14388-released/   Followed by the Windows Server 2016 launch at the end of September https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2016/07/12/windows-server-2016-new-current-branch-for-business-servicing-option/   TP5 is stated to be feature complete – my testing so far shows some […]

I needed to copy the same file to multiple machines so I tried this: $computers = ‘W16CN01’, ‘W16CN02’ $s = New-PSSession -ComputerName $computers Copy-Item -Path ‘C:\Source\Windows 2016 TP5\Cumulative Update for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 (KB3163016)\AMD64-all-windows10.0-kb3163016-x64_83d6e9bca94a64a5d9be3d81cdb182e540285848.msu’ -Destination C:\Scripts -ToSession $s Remove-PSSession –Session $s   It failed with: Copy-Item : Cannot convert ‘System.Object[]’ to the […]