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.
Windows Subsystem for Linux gets new ‘mirrored’ network mode, providing IPv6 support. This is huge! Update WSL2 in Windows Insider Program to have experimental IPv6 support.
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.
Use PowerShell, Performance Counters and WMI to get the current number of active connections to IIS websites. Perfect for monitoring IIS webservers in Zabbix.
Learn how to reconfigure Windows Server’s TCP/IP stack and IIS for high performing websites. Prevent running out of available ports/sockets (port exhaustion).
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.
Before you can properly debug crash and memory dumps in Windows (Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows Server), you need to install WinDbg -Windows Debugger- and its debugging symbols. In this article I explain how to set up these debugging symbols for WinDbg in Windows. Debug BSOD like a boss!
To extract all files from a .msi file, use the following msiexec command and arguments. Windows has the ability to allow the MSI package (.msi file) contents to be extracted using the command line or via a script.
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.
Emulate ternary or conditional operator in PowerShell 5. It takes three operands: a condition followed by a question mark (?), then an expression to execute if the condition is truthy followed by a colon (:), and finally the expression to execute if the condition is falsy. This operator is frequently used as an alternative to an if…else statement.
How to install and configure Monit monitoring in Windows 10 WSL. Set up a Monit monitoring service for your websites and services. A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog article about setting up Monit monitoring on an Ubuntu VM on Hyper-V. Now it’s time to do the same, but then in Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL. For this, I use Ubuntu.
Learn how to silently import a .reg file into your Windows Registry. This neat regedit trick comes in handy quite often. The regedit command is valid for Windows 11, 10, Windows Server 2022, 2019 and older
