PowerShell Compare-Hash Function

Quite some time ago I created a PowerShell function which allowed one to compare a given cryptographic hash against one locally generated to see if they match. Looking back on the old version (here is a link to the blog article https://www.bytesizedalex.com/powershell-cryptographic-hash-checker/) it is very much reminiscent of old school batch files. I decided now … Read more

Visual Studio Code and Team Services Integration

I finally got round to creating my colleagues and I an account on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). If you haven’t looked into it then basically it is the cloud version of Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) which is typically run within your own environment and managed internally. We have been looking to move … Read more

PowerShell Cryptographic Hash Checker

I decided to build a little cryptographic hash checker in PowerShell leveraging some built-in cmdlets and other functions. While there are lots of tools that already do this, many with very nice GUIs I decided it would be fun to build one of my own. The newly made cmdlet is very simple. You select what cryptographic … Read more

HP 3PAR StoreServ PowerShell Toolkit Installation

HP recently released a PowerShell toolkit for the 3PAR StoreServ SAN. This is great news if you are familiar with the Microsoft PowerShell environment and wish to leverage it to manage your 3PAR arrays. Today I’m going to deploy the 3PAR PowerShell toolkit and demonstrate some of the commands that can be leveraged.   Download … Read more

Microsoft Azure PowerShell Integration

As nice as the two Azure management portals are (the new one is still in beta) nothing quite beats the ability to manage things through a CLI. PowerShell being the Microsoft ‘go to’ I wanted to get myself setup to access Azure through the ISE to make things easier. There is a good guide on … Read more

List Windows Server Roles and Features with PowerShell

I’m sure for anyone who administers Microsoft Windows Server the Server Manager console is an all too familiar place. It does make it easy to add/remove roles and features however PowerShell is another great option that can really speed things up at times. So – what can we do with PowerShell to list the roles and … Read more

Recycle IIS App Pools

We have a system which regularly requires the IIS app pools to be recycled, I haven’t yet gotten round to writing this in PowerShell or scripting with some form of orchestration software. For now it’s just a good old batch script. I’m going to remove most of the script and just leave the important lines … Read more

WSUS – DMZ Server

I have a virtual machine in a DMZ which is not part of my Active Directory domain however I want to configure it to point at my internal Windows Server Update Services VM (WSUS) server for patching. If it had been in AD I would have deployed a GPO however that not being an option I … Read more

ESXi NTP PowerShell Script

I wanted a quick way to configure NTP settings on a number of VMware ESXi hosts across two datacenters. Hosts in site A should point to the NTP source locally primarily and to site B NTP as a secondary source and vice versa for hosts in site B. The following isn’t perfect and a lot … Read more