ApexSQL Audit Is Reaching End of Life — Here’s Your Next Step

Resolving "HTTP 403" Errors in PowerShell Remoting If you use PowerShell remoting and get “HTTP 403” errors, one of the more obscure reasons for this is a proxy that interferes with your request. Excluding the Proxy to Fix the Issue It’s easy to exclude the proxy,...

PowerShell 2+ Sometimes it becomes necessary to replace special characters like German “Umlauts” in order to normalize user names or email addresses. Here is a little function that illustrates how this can be done: #requires -Version 3 function...

PowerShell 5 The free Microsoft RSAT tools come with a full-blown ActiveDirectory module, but sometimes simple AD tasks can be mastered with just a bit of .NET code, and no dependencies to the RSAT tools. As an example, here is a function that can search users by...

Modifying a Specific Cell in an Excel Spreadsheet Using PowerShell If you need to change the content of a specific cell in an Excel spreadsheet, take a look at this sample code: $ExcelPath = 'c:\path..to..some..excel..file.xlst' $excel = New-Object -ComObject...

Windows maintains a log file named cbs.log in $env:windir\logs\cbs. It logs various pieces of information related to the Windows trusted installer, for example the installation of windows updates, and can grow massively in size. How Windows Handles Large CBS Log Files...

Generating Temporary Passwords the Easy Way Check out this simple way of creating temporary passwords: You can easily vary the password length: change the number…

Adding New Items to an XML Document Efficiently If you need to add new items to an XML document that already contains such items, the easiest way is to search for an existing item, then clone it. You can then update the information in the cloned item and insert it...

Bringing a Process Window to the Foreground with PowerShell PowerShell can use Add-Type to access internal Windows API functions. This way, it is easy to bring any process window into the foreground. Here is the function you need: #requires -Version 2 function...

By default, the Telnet client is disabled on Windows systems. You can easily enable it with a one liner in PowerShell, though. Just launch a PowerShell with full Administrator privileges, then run this command: PS C:\> dism /online /Enable-Feature...

By default, PowerShell remoting uses Kerberos authentication and works only in domain environments, and only when you specify computer names, not IP addresses. Configuring PowerShell Remoting in Peer-to-Peer Network To use PowerShell remoting in other scenarios such...

The Test-Connection cmdlet implements a simple ping to check whether a system responds to an ICMP request. Unfortunately, you cannot specify a timeout. Test-Connection defaults to a static timeout of 4 seconds: PS C:\> Test-Connection -ComputerName...

Using Get-CimInstance as an Alternative to Get-WmiObject PowerShell 3.0 added an alternative to Get-WmiObject: Get-CimInstance seems to work very similar and can retrieve information from the internal WMI service: PS C:\> Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_BIOS...

PowerShell has a built-in support to wait until a process or many processes end: simply use Wait-Process. Understanding Data Marts and Dimensional Modeling There is no support to do the opposite: wait until a process has started. Here is a function that can wait for...

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in PowerShell ISE In the PowerShell ISE, there are two key shortcuts that can help you. Pressing TAB works just like in the console, and each time you press TAB, you get a tabexpansion result. Using CTRL+SPACE for IntelliSense in PowerShell...

Updating Active Directory User Information with PowerShell If you have installed the free RSAT tools from Microsoft, you can use PowerShell to update information stored in your AD user account, for example your office phone number. Permissions for Updating Active...

Whenever you add delegation rights to an AD object (i.e. allow a user to manage the members of an organizational unit), you really invoke a change of security settings for the given AD object. Cloning Active Directory Security Settings Easily AD security descriptors...