Use PowerShell Test-NetConnection to test if a TCP port is opened. Along with ping to verify a host is online makes it ideal for scripting and automation.
If you need to verify files are untampered with, you have to create a file checksum -or file hash- that you can use to verify. PowerShell offers this functionality with Get-FileHash cmdlet. Or use certutil.exe.
Sometimes you need to convert a Windows SID (security identifier) to an username, or vice versa (an username to an SID). In this post I show you a couple of methods to translate the one into the other. One is using VBScript and one is using PowerShell.
Quickly get SQL Server backup .bak file header information using PowerShell and SQL Server Management Objects (SMO). Determine the name of the SQL server that wrote the backup set.
Use PowerShell, Performance Counters and WMI to get the current number of active connections to IIS websites. Perfect for monitoring IIS webservers in Zabbix.
Use PowerShell to install SSL certificate in Windows Server and change its FriendlyName property. As a bonus, I show you how to verify a certificate’s Common Name (Subject) and Subject Alternative Name (SAN) using certutil.exe and PowerShell Get-PfxCertificate.
In this post I show you how you can use PowerShell to install Windows Updates. Quickly and silently. This makes the use of PSWindowsUpdate module perfect for your day to day automation. The module even supports scheduling (on remote computers too!), it has the ability to search WSUS and Windows Update for updates, scheduling and performing the download and installation of updates.
In this post I provide you with a small PowerShell function you can use to send email over a TLS secured SMTP connection with SMTP authentication. As a framework you can use in your own scripting and extend it. You can even create a PowerShell module of it.
In this post I showed you how you can turn Windows 11 and Windows 10 with WSL into a fully fledged development environment. Here are the settings and tools I use for DevOps/SysOps on Windows. It may take some getting used to, but if you’re as shortcut-Ninja as I’m (I alt-tab, ctrl-c/ctrl-v a lot), you can work pretty fast in this set up.
Add VirtIO drivers to your Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) to recover your Windows virtual machine after a hard crash. Learn to customize your Windows System Restore and rescue Windows like a pro!
Configure SSH public key authentication for Windows Server in Active Directory (AD). In this article I’ll explain how to store and get your SSH public keys from Windows Server Active Directory user property.
