In this blog we will dive into what is a Powershell Module, how its changed and then what can we do to build and publish the module to the Powershell Gallery. I recently did this presentation again at VMworld Explore 2022 and it was a hit, so I figured its finally time to get it here on the blog so it can be referenced and viewed year round.

I have been knee deep in migrations, so after clicking through a few times to create clustered file shares, I finally decided to script them. Here is that script I thought I would share. Thanksfully there was the NTFSSecurity module published by microsoft that makes permissions a breeze. You can get more details by viewing the module page.

Pre-Requsites

• NTFS Security Module

Link to Script

• Create-SMBShare.ps1

Preparing to Execute the Script

Fill in the appropriate variables, and execute the script.

In the midst of playing with Ansible and figured my most common use case would be executing powershell scripts on remote servers, so scavenged around and put this together.

Pre-Requsites

• ansible
• ansible-winrm

Link to Git Project

• ansible_powershell

Preparing to Execute the Script

This script assumes you have already installed and configured Ansible, downloaded the Git Repo and installed the WinRM python module.

Define your group variables. Create a hostgroup.yml file in this folder. This is where you specify the username, password and WinRM port to use. This file should mimit the host group …

So I am in the process of rolling out a new 2012R2 DHCP Server Cluster, and I thought i would share my scripts with the community.

I have also rolled it into a Vagrant package so you can easily test it on your own, and execute the scripts by themselves against your environment to deploy.

Here is a link to the GitHub repository containing all the code.

The code is also fairly simple, it pulls in data from a few .CSV files and deploy’s the servers, installs the roles, creates the scopes, creates MAC Address allow policies and then creates a couple reservations.

So after recently implementing directory sync i wanted to make sure any new groups were properly set up in active directory.

Unfortunately i was unable to find any commands so thanks to MS Support I was able to find a way to identify these. You would think it would be under Get-DistributionGroup but it is actually under Get-MSolGroup. After connecting via remote powershell you can run the below command to see all that are not synced.

So I have been working in a few situations where i have wanted to use Horizon 6 published (RDS) applications but having to either launch the Horizon View client within a VDI or have users be forced to logon again has been a deal breaker.

Upon further research i finally found the right combination of settings to allow users to launch the RDS Hosted Applications via a Shortcut and automatically login to the view client making this process seamless.

Chrome depreciated one of the features that allowed these popups to work, here is a temporary workaround to get it working.

Download the Chrome Policy Plugin here

1. Open the zip file you just downloaded and locate the .ADM file that best matches your system:
2. Extract the .ADM file to any folder on your hard drive
3. Go to Start > Run, and run gpedit.msc
4. Right-click Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates, and select Add/Remove Templates:
5. Add the adm template that you saved to disk earlier:

• You should now see the template underneath a Google > Google …

So upon trying to install .Net 3.5 on a new server today it would not allow me to, it kept telling me the source files were unavailable even after pointing to source directly to multiple ISO’s and copied the files locally.

Upon further research I stumbled across this microsoft KB article and used it to ultimately find my fix. KB2734782

Here are the full steps I followed to get .NET installed.

1. Open gpedit.msc to modify your local group policy.

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I don’t know whats going on in the past few weeks but the sheer amount of zeroday exploits via email have risen. To protect yourselves against this I would recommend setting up a transport rule to drop or reject any email with executable content. This can be done for Exchange 2013 or Office365 (Exchange Online).

1. Login to Exchange Admin Center using administrative credentials
2. On the left pane select “Mail flow”
3. On the top pane select " Rules"
4. Click on the “+” sign and select create a new rule
5. Give a name to the rule and select “more options” …