In light of our recent announcement regarding the future of PowerShell Summit, we are extending the call for topics to the end of October, 2015.
We invite speakers to re-visit their existing proposals and indicate the desired length of their session. For example, simply add “[45min]” to the session abstract if you feel your session is suitable for our traditional 45-minute time slot. Or, indicate an alternative of [90min] or [120min].
As we kick off PowerShell Summit Europe 2015, I wanted to share some decisions we’ve made regarding the future of the event.
When we first launched PowerShell Summit in 2013, our goal was to be the spiritual successor of the former “PowerShell Deep Dive” events held as part of Quest’s The Experts Conference (TEC) event. Dell’s acquisition of Quest eliminated TEC, and PowerShell.org worked with the PowerShell product team to create the Summit.
Find Stale Accounts in Active Directory
Everyone who has managed Active Directory knows that keeping it free of “stale” accounts is a tough task. Typically no one cares about this until it’s time for the Microsoft True Up. Then we’ve got to hustle to get rid of all these unused accounts before we have to pay for them again! Pre-PowerShell it was tough because well… you didn’t have POWERSHELL! Now the hardest part about finding these accounts is defining what stale means to your company. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, but there are some things that we can check to help lead us to an optimal answer. You can read the rest of this article by clicking on the link below. While you are there check out some of my other posts, the script repository and the resource page.
If you look at DevOps as a means of removing hurdles between coders and users, there’s almost no better real-world, practical example than Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. If you’re not familiar with EBS, look into it - it’s kinda cool.
EBS isn’t suitable for every situation, to be sure. It’s mainly useful for Linux VMs, running Web sites, in fact, which isn’t 100% of your workloads. But the idea is pretty awesome. Developers store their code in a source control repo - ideally, Git. Along with their code - and this is the cool bit - they include a configuration file. This file can list things like environment variables, packages (installed from repos using NPM, RHL, YUM, etc), and so on.
Hello, PowerShell people! I’ve never posted on PowerShell.org before and so I feel as though I owe you a quick introduction before we dive into the tip I’d like to share with you.
My name is Thomas Rayner and I am a Microsoft MVP for Windows PowerShell. I’m also a systems administrator and degree program instructor. I volunteer a fair bit of time as the President of the Edmonton Microsoft User Group (EMUG). EMUG has a more in depth bio for me on their About Executive page in case you want to know more about the person behind the avatar. If you’re in the Edmonton area, I strongly recommend signing up for our mailing list so you can come attend the great events we put on.
I’m Locked Out, Help!
If you’ve been a sys admin for more than a week you’ve probably heard this…“I’m locked-out, help!”. Normally the user has made their way to your cube and is impatiently tapping their foot waiting for you to magically solve there problem. So you find their account, reset their password and everything is right with the world…Or is it? Two minutes later they show up again because their account was locked-out before they even got back to their desk. Now what do you do?
Earlier in August we mentioned that modularity and abstraction are quite helpful. PowerShell modules can help enable these concepts.
You might ask “Modules… why can’t I just write a function?” There are a number of benefits to bundling your functions into modules:
- Simplify code organization
- Group related functions together
- Share state between functions, but not with the user
- Re-use “helper functions” that you don’t want exposed to the user
- Improve discoverability:
Find-Module MyModuleGet-Command -Module MyModule
* Simplify distribution: Install-Module MyModule
`Where does that last bullet come from?
The PowerShell Gallery
If you’ve worked with Perl, you’ve probably used CPAN, which archives more than 150,000 modules. Other languages have similar tools, like PyPI for Python, or RubyGems for Ruby.
Our September 2015 puzzle is another one-liner, to help get you out of Summer Mood and back into Work Mode. This time, it’s a pretty real-world scenario, designed to test your understanding of the pipeline and how data can be manipulated within it. You’ll need to really grasp pipeline parameter binding to make this work in the shortest command possible.
Join the Mississippi PowerShell User Group virtually on Tuesday, September 8th at 8:30pm Central Time when PowerShell MVP Boe Prox will present “The Art of PowerShell Runspaces”.
PowerShell runspaces are a known but little documented area that can help to provide performance improvements in your scripts. Besides just using this for performance gains, you can use this to provide a snappier approach to building GUIs in PowerShell. This presentation will show you examples of using Runspaces, RunspacePools as well as utilizing shared variables that can be viewed and modified in multiple runspaces during runtime. Also being demoed is a module called PoshRSJob which provides runspace multhreading in a familiar jobs infrastructure.
