PowerShell

Using PowerShell in Containers

The vision for PowerShell Core is to be able to run PowerShell anywhere. In this article, I’m going to discuss how you can use Docker Containers to enable just that. We’ll look at running PowerShell in a container, running cmdlets, running different versions of PowerShell at the same time, and also how to build our own “serverless” computing platform. Let’s address a few reasons why you would want to run PowerShell in a container.

Speaking at PowerShell Summit 2019

Speaking at PowerShell Summit 2019! I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2019 the conference runs from April 29th 2018 through May 3rd 2019. This is an incredible event packed with fantastic content and speakers. Check out the amazing schedule! All the data you need on going is in this excellent brochure right here! <p> This year I have two sessions! </p> <p> On <strong>Tuesday, April 30th at 11:00AM</strong> &#8211; I’m presenting “<a href="https://app.

Testing if a Port is Open With PowerShell

Ever want to confirm that a port is accessible from one computer to another? There’s a PowerShell cmdlet for that, Test-NetConnection. With the -Port option, this cmdlet will do a quick TCP three-way handshake on the remote system to confirm that the service is available and reports back if it succeeded or not. Check out that last line of output TcpTestSucceeded: False. That indicates that this port is not accessible. You can see, however, that the system is reachable via ICMP (Ping), PingSuceeded: True so we know that the remote system is alive, just not listening on the port we want to access.

Installing OpenSSH Server on Windows 10

So in yesterday’s post we learned that the OpenSSH client is included with the Windows 10, Update 1803! Guess, what else is included in this server, an OpenSSH Server! Yes, that’s right…you can now run an OpenSSH server on your Windows 10 system and get a remote terminal! So in this post, let’s check out what we need to do to get OpenSSH Server up and running. First, we’ll need to ensure we update the system to Windows 10, Update 1803.

OpenSSH is now Part of Windows!

Today is a big day! The OpenSSH client version 7.6p1 is now part of the Windows 10 operating system! Microsoft released Windows 10 Update 1803 and included in that release is the OpenSSH client, which is installed as part of the update. That’s right an SSH client as part of the Windows operating system by default! Also included with this update is the OpenSSH Server which is included as an Windows Feature on Demand.

Distributing SSH User Keys via PowerShell

Folks in the Linux world are used to moving SSH keys to and from systems enabling password-less authentication. Let’s take a minute to look at what it takes to use PowerShell to distribute SSH user keys to remote systems. In the OpenSSH package there’s a command ssh-copy-id which is a bash script that copies a user’s public key to a remote system. There’s a little intelligence in the script to set things up properly on the remote system for password-less key based authentication.

Speaking at PowerShell Summit 2018!

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 on the conference runs from April 9th 2018 through April 12th 2018. This is an incredible event packed with fantastic content and speakers. Check out the amazing schedule! All the data you need on going is in this excellent brochure right here! This year I have two sessions! On Tuesday, April 10th at 2:00PM – I’m presenting “OpenSSH Internals for PowerShell Pros”

Warning Handling in dbatools Automation Tasks

So I’ve been using dbatools for automated restore tasks and came across a SQL Server Agent job that I wrote that was reporting success but the job was actually failing. What I found was the function I used, Restore-DbaDatabase, was not able to access the path that I was trying to restore databases from. The Restore-DbaDatabase function, and all dbatools functions according to the dbatools team on Slack, will throw a Warning rather than an Error by design.

Reflecting on the Last Year of Microsoft’s OpenSource Technologies

This past year has certainly been interesting in the world of Linux. Microsoft has taken a new strategy and is embracing the open source model. It’s releasing it’s key software products with versions for Linux. It’s truly a remarkable time. In this post I want to highlight some of the bigger events and cover what does this mean to you and where you can go do get some training on these topics.

PowerShell Remoting in Multi-Platform Environments – Use Cases

In our previous post we discussed how to implement OpenSSH (the plumbing) as the transport layer for PowerShell remoting. In this post, we’re going to leverage that configuration and look at some common remoting use cases. This is one of the core things I use everyday when I work with PowerShell. Remoting gives me the ability to administer scale up and administer large collections of systems. So like I said in my very first post about my PowerShell journey, it’s become a part of my every day life and techniques like this are at the core of how I use PowerShell.