Richard Siddaway's Blog

Way back when I used to take Microsoft certification exams there were often questions of the form “Perform task X with the minimum of administrative effort” Most, if nor all, of the possible answers would be correct but the correct answer was the one that achieved the goal with the minimum amount of work.   […]

Be careful with start and end dates when search for files or through event logs.  Often people want to see what happened yesterday If you do this PS> $end =  Get-Date PS> $start = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1) PS> $start 30 October 2016 16:32:35 PS> $end 31 October 2016 16:32:16 And you get the last 24 hours   […]

Registration for the 2017 PowerShell Summit opens tomorrow – 1 November 2016   First come first served. The agenda and registration are available here – https://eventloom.com/event/home/summit2017

If you start  WSL (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) and see messages like this:   7 packages can be updated. 1 update is a security update. root@RSsurfacePro2:~#   You can view the available updates: root@RSsurfacePro2:~# apt-get update Hit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease [95.7 kB] Get:3 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease [94.5 kB] Get:4 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu […]

The agenda for next year’s Summit is almost complete – we’ve notified all speakers as to whether their sessions have been accepted or not. If you haven’t received your notification please check your spam/junk mail.   We have a small number of sessions yet to publish – mainly around possible focus groups on the Wednesday […]

If you were in the audience at the 2006 Microsoft European TechEd (or IT Forum or whatever they called it that year) key note presentation you’ll know that 14 November 2016 is the 10th anniversary of PowerShell.   The Powershell team is presenting a day long event on 14th November to commemorate the anniversary.   […]

We’re finalising the agenda for the 2017 Summit. Most of the sessions are now up on the event site. Go to https://powershell.org/summit/ and click the Brochure and Registration link. You’ll be able to down load a brochure describing next years Summit and view the proposed agenda (it is subject to change with no notice). Registration […]

Its easy to get the last boot time of a Windows machine but how do you get the uptime   function Get-Uptime { [CmdletBinding()] param (    [string]$ComputerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME ) $os = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName $ComputerName $uptime = (Get-Date) – $os.LastBootUpTime $uptime }   Use Get-CimInstance to get the Win32_OperatingSystem class. To calculate […]

Windows 10 gives you the option of installing BASH on Ubuntu – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about also known as the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). More information from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/   I thought it would be interesting to compare some of the bash commands with their PowerShell equivalents.   First off – current location. Its not obvious from the […]

This is a very interesting article – https://powershell.org/2016/10/12/no-easy-button-for-configuration-management/. The premise that there is no “easy” button in IT is spot on and fits with this quote from  Theodore Roosevelt: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…”     IT is constantly changing – new technologies, new techniques, […]