Microsoft MVP 2014 for PowerShell !

What an amazing way to start the year !!! It is a great pleasure and honor to announce that on the 1st of January I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for outstanding contributions in Windows PowerShell.

Dear Francois-Xavier Cat, 

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2014 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in PowerShell technical communities during the past year.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank especially Vivian for her support and motivation, Simran and Joel from Microsoft Canada (who first contacted me back in September), Andrey from Domtar and Jean-Philippe from Akilon.

I was able to get to this point today thanks to the great content created by the PowerShell Community.
Just to name a  few people I follow: Ed Wilson (The Scripting Guy), +Ravikanth Chaganti , +Boe Prox , +Jeffery Hicks , +Aleksandar Nikolic , +Lee Holmes , +Brandon Shell , +Don Jones , ...

Here is my Microsoft MVP Profile: http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/mvp/Francois-Xavier%20Cat-5000475

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, leave a comment or send me an email at fxcat@lazywinadmin.com. I invite you to follow me on Twitter @lazywinadm / Google+ / LinkedIn. You can also follow the LazyWinAdmin Blog on Facebook Page and Google+ Page

Top Five 2013 LazyWinAdmin Blog Posts

The year 2013 has been a pretty good year for the LazyWinAdmin blog.
Thank you guys for following my blog and participating to the comments discussions. Thanks also for those who give me advices, critics and ideas to improve my scripts, I think It helps everyone (and myself) to improve our knowledge everyday, Really appreciated :-)

I get more and more page views, comments,... every month  :-) and I thought It would be nice to give a small Top Five 2013 of the LazyWinAdmin blog posts.

Top Five 2013 Blog posts:

WS2012 Storage - NFS Server - Configure NFS for VMware vSphere 5.1 Home Lab
This article focus on how to configure NFS on Windows Server 2012 with PowerShell for a VMware vSphere 5.1 host.


PowerShell Studio 2012 - WinForms - Creating a basic GUI (Video) 
This is a quick tutorial (with a video) on how to create a really basic Winform/Graphical User Interface (GUI) using SAPIEN PowerShell Studio 2012.


PowerShell - Monitor and Report Active Directory Group Membership Change
This is probably one of my most popular script. This PowerShell script let you monitor membership of one or multiple groups. You can specify the names of the group(s) directly, from a file or from an OU path.

PowerShell - Get a SubString out of a String using RegEx 
In 2013 I started playing a bit more with Regex, this post talked about getting text from a string. I'll post more about this subject soon.

PowerShell 4.0 is now available
The team of Jeffery Snover, the PowerShell Team,  realeased a new version of this awesome tool ! more cmdlets!! more fun!!



Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, leave a comment or send me an email at fxcat@lazywinadmin.com. I invite you to follow me on Twitter @lazywinadm / Google+ / LinkedIn. You can also follow the LazyWinAdmin Blog on Facebook Page and Google+ Page.

[UPDATE] PowerShell - Monitor and Report Active Directory Group Membership Change

UPDATE: The most recent update is available on Github

I found some time to update the script "Monitor Active Directory Membership changes". This is the version 1.6.

To summarize, this script allow you to monitor Active Directory groups membership changes. The script will send your a report via email only when a change occur. I explained in details in my last post how the script work.


So what are the main changes in this version ?

• SearchRoot you can now specify the Organization Unit path(s) where all your groups are located, the script will take care of the rest and watch them all. You also have the option to filter using the parameters SearchScope, GroupType, GroupScope.
• File you can now specify one or multiple files where the list of groups is saved. Distinguished Names, SID, GUID, GroupName, Domain\GroupName are accepted.

Previous post related to this script:
[2013/10] PowerShell - Monitor and Report Active Directory Group Membership Change
[2012/03] Powershell - Monitor Active Directory Groups membership change

Thank you: I want to thank those who sent me suggestions via email or posts comments, I'm very happy to see that this script is helping a lot of my fellow sysadmins.

PowerShell - Add AD Site Subnet

Last month I posted a script that report the Missing Subnets from the Active Directory. The script goes on each Domain Controllers and get the last x entries from the NETLOGON.log file.
Once this report is generated, you might want to check with your Telecom guy/team to get the correct network mask, correct site of each entries and fix this situation.

Reminder: Subnet objects (class subnet) define network subnets in Active Directory. A network subnet is a segment of a TCP/IP network to which a set of logical IP addresses is assigned. Subnets group computers in a way that identifies their physical proximity on the network. Subnet objects in Active Directory are used to map computers to sites.

Today I will show how to add those missing subnets in your Active Directory using PowerShell on Windows Server 2012 and Previous versions via ADSI.

PowerShell - Get-DomainComputer (ADSI)

The following function use ADSI to query Computer objects from the Active Directory. Optionally an alternate credentials and/or a different domain can be specified.

Once in a while, everyone "enjoy" doing Auditing at work...,ok maybe not everyone :-).... so last week, an colleague of mine needed to get the name of the Primary user of each workstations that connect to one of their critical application.

Lucky for me, first he had the list of workstations and second we have the name of the primary user information in the Active Directory located in the description property ! :-) (This is added when the computer is built and joined to the domain the first time).

So he asked me if I could help and get this information somehow. My answer was obviously ... PowerShell!
This could be done very easily using the ActiveDirectory Module but unfortunately RSAT (Remote Server Administrator Tools) feature was not installed on his computer. Why not use ADSI then ? :-)

PowerShell - Using ADSI with alternate Credentials

The following PowerShell code will show you how to run ADSI with alternate credentials to get information from the Active Directory.

I will query Group objects in this example, my filter is define by the following line: "(objectCategory=Group)"

PowerShell 4.0 is now available

PowerShell 4.0 has been released by Microsoft and  is now available to download and install with the Windows Management Framework 4.0 (WMF 4.0).

Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language designed especially for system administration. Built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell helps IT professionals and power users control and automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows.

Windows PowerShell allows you to run scripts, functions, and modules of cmdlets. Cmdlets are simple verb-noun commands that help you automate management of roles and features that run on the Windows operating system.

After you install WMF 4.0, Windows PowerShell is upgraded to version 4.0.

DOWNLOAD HERE

PowerShell - Renaming a bunch of folders

In my previous post I talked about Organizing my script directory, naming convention, preferences and bottlenecks... Today let's reorganize some of those script folders.

Renaming a bunch of folders

At my work, all the scripts related to VMware are named ESX-<Category>-<Explicit Title>. And I use the same naming convention at home for my own scripts. So let's say I want to rename all those *ESX* folders by VMWARE instead.
Something like this: VMWARE-<Category>-<Explicit Title>