IndyPoSh – Matt Blogs IT

PowerShell Summit Round Up

By MattG / May 19, 2014 June 1, 2020 / Administrator

I’ve been fairly distant from my blog for quite a few months… work has been very busy and preparing for the PowerShell Summit really took quite a bit of time. On top of all of that I was also traveling to Microsoft TechEd shortly after the PowerShell Summit.

The PowerShell Summit was an amazing event, probably the most well prepared conference I’ve attended. The venue was great, the evening events were very cool and the food was fantastic! I was lucky enough that my presentations were Monday morning, so I was able to relax and enjoy the remainder of the conference.

One fun thing that wasn’t well known is that the Sunday before the conference I did a quick run through my VM’s to validate my demos would work… I started walking through my SharePoint Demo and guess what… no go. Luckily I had all of the media on my local machine, after troubleshooting a bit I gave up and rebuilt the demo day before presenting it. Everything went smoothly the next day.

I was also lucky enough that Aaron Hoover sat in on my PowerCLI: How to Automate Your VMware Environment Reports session and recorded everything. The recording was done on a webcam, so you will see it have to refocus occasionally. I have the slides posted on the blog so you can follow along with those.

It was a great experience presenting at the PowerShell Summit and I hope present in coming years. Now the very exciting information at the Summit did not come from my session, but sessions from Jeffrey Snover and the PowerShell Product team.

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IndyPoSh and Indy VMUG PowerShell Basics v3 and v4

By MattG / January 8, 2014 June 1, 2020 / Administrator, Microsoft

Hello everyone! Long time no post; more details surrounding that will be coming! Tonight I would like to share the PowerPoint I used for the IndyPoSh/Indy VMUG presentation I presented tonight! This goes very brief over PowerShell Basics for PowerShell v3 and v4.

PowerShell Pranks – Making Work Fun with Creepy Voices!

By MattG / October 9, 2013 June 1, 2020 / Microsoft, Out-of-Band Post

In every IT office I have worked in, pulling pranks co-workers has been a standard. They tend to be low-tech; co-workers leave their computers unlocked, change their background, and maybe change their Windows sound effects. They tend to be small and easy to revert.

We had an intern program over the summer in our office and a specific intern who wasn’t very wise when it came to locking his computer. We got him probably 10-15 times with a picture of David Hasselhoff in a thong. We also installed some fun Google Chrome add-ons that would change every image on the page to something else.

These got boring, which is very unusual when making someone have a sexy background. However, because we became so bored with it, we decided to take it a step further. We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to automate this with PowerShell? So our initial idea was changing the background to a random image. Looking through the ways of doing that was semi-complicated, and I was feeling lazy. So we ditched the idea, and it was on the back burner for a long time.

One evening I came home from work and stumbled upon this fantastic post on the PowerShell Sub-Reddit “A fun script for Friday – make your friend’s computer start talking to him/her.” To sum it up, it’ll use Text to Speech to have the computer talk. In the example posted, it used PowerShell Remoting. Using PowerShell Remoting for such a malicious intent may cross a line, depends on who the target is and how much you abuse it. In my case, the computers were not domain joined, and so I couldn’t use that as easily. So I decided to take my Friday night and make it quite a bit more “portable.”

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IndyVMUG Conference PowerCLI – Community Session Slides

By MattG / July 25, 2013 June 1, 2020 / Administrator, Microsoft, VMWare

Today I presented Intro to PowerCLI at the IndyVMUG Conference. As promised I am posting the PowerPoint slides that were used during that presentation. This session covered the basics you should know in PowerShell before you start playing with PowerCLI, a slight glimpse into using PowerCLI and some scripting.

PowerShell v4 Desired State Configuration Deep Dive

By MattG / June 30, 2013 June 1, 2020 / Administrator, Microsoft

During my time at Microsoft TechEd many new things were announced. My all time favorite announcement was PowerShell v4. There are many great things coming out with PowerShell v4, things that I haven’t really gotten a chance to dig into much yet. However the one of the few things I have run through would be the Desired State Configuration which I will refer to as DSC throughout this blog.

DSC is a way to manage the configuration for multiple servers utilizing a single script for the deployment. In the example I will use is managing an IIS Configuration across multiple servers. However as the DSC is developed there will be other usability options for this. …

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