A requirement for my business was to capture information for every song I had. The information required was the Composer (the person/s that wrote the song), the Year and the Record Label. I have over 13,000 songs and doing this on a manual basis would be an administration nightmare. So I used my PowerShell skills and set out to achieve what I found was a very reliable manual process, but turned into an automatic process. The most reliable process that I can find to date is: To grab the Record Label information from iTunes and a site http://staff.australian-charts.com/ to be used as…
Dropbox in PowerShell and as Windows Service
Dropbox comes in handy as a way of distributing files across systems. You can easily get files to a whole fleet of computers and then use PowerShell to automate tasks. If you ever wanted to run Dropbox as a Windows Service so it starts with Windows before a user logs in, follow the instructions below. But first you need this tool srvany Delete the Dropbox service: sc delete “Dropbox Service” Run the following command: sc create Dropbox binPath= “C:\…\srvany.exe” DisplayName= “Dropbox Service” Choose properties on Dropbox service > Click on tab “Log On” > Click “This account“, and select the appropriate account in order…
Azure Advisors
Microsoft Azure, what is it? Many people don’t know exactly what it is. It’s basically a set of servers hosted by Microsoft in state of the art datacenters around the world, the hardware is what Microsoft have full control over, but it’s everything on top of the hardware which is available to the public. Things on top of the hardware are things like hypervisors and VMs (virtual machines). On top of this there is a multitude of services, most of which – PaaS & SaaS – which is managed by Microsoft. No matter what you use in Azure, there are…
Azure News 2016 – Week 48
A summary of Azure news for the past week that’s been making headlines over the internet. Azure news can be heard in the the latest Need to Know podcast Episode 121. Auto-shutdown for Azure VMs Back in September Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft would no longer compete on price with AWS and focus on providing ‘real’ value to customers. In the theme of ‘value‘, Microsoft have announced the technology they have been using to enable auto shutdown for Azure DevTest labs, they are now using for all Azure Resource Manager based VMs. OMS Service Map The long awaited OMS Service…
Azure News 2016 – Week 47
More Azure News, been quite busy this week, myself and the Azure team. Lots of new things released and some events. Also in case you missed it, here is Satya Nadella’s keynote he did at the Microsoft Developer Event in Sydney on Wednesday November 16, 2016: Azure Documentation You might remember back in June we talked about the new Microsoft documentation site was currently in preview https://docs.microsoft.com Just recently Microsoft have moved all of the Azure documentation to this new platform and it is all live. The popular documentation websites TechNet and MSDN are both about 15 years old. Improvements…
MVP Summit & Microsoft
Here I am at the MVP summit it’s both myself and Stephane Budo’s first MVP summit. My original thought of coming to the summit in the weeks prior was that is was all based at Microsoft HQ and everyone was grouped in together into one building and it was an unplanned casual catch-up with MVP peers with drinking involved and food provided. It was told to me soon after and before coming to the summit that it was more like an Ignite/TechEd where there were sessions in which you had to register. Just like Ignite/TechEd, there were tracks, e.g. myself…
PowerShell WinRM with un-trusted certificate
This is perfect for connecting to a remote server using PowerShell WinRM and you don’t need to worry about any client certificates. No longer need to worry about using the correct CN. Perfect for spinning up Azure virtual machines e.g. Nano Server and connecting to and managing Azure hosted Windows Nano server using PowerShell. This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters #region Connect to Remote PowerShell…
Windows 10 taskbar preview thumbnails
Windows 10 taskbar application preview thumbnails sometimes gets really annoying, if you accidentally put your mouse over the of the opened taskbar apps, the app preview can pop up instantly and the preview thumbnail doesn’t always go away. Run this in PowerShell, it delays the pop up and fixes the accidental event of the cursor going over the top of the taskbar applications. This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode…
OMS PowerShell
Below is some example PowerShell which integrates with OMS (Operations Management Suite). It has some examples on how you can pull out OMS saved searches and run saved searches. It also has some examples of gathering some information from the Security & Audit solution working with some particular security domains. To be able to use PowerShell against OMS successfully, you can’t logon to PowerShell using a Microsoft account. You need to use an organisational based account. This same account would need to have the necessary permissions against OMS. I recommend you install this Azure PowerShell module https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/releases/tag/v3.0.0-September2016 as this contains the cmdlets you…
Azure News 2016 – Week 42
A few things happening in the world of Azure #AzureAD Domain Services is now GA! Lift and shift to the cloud just got WAY easier! In May this year, Microsoft announced several exciting new features and improvements to the service including secure LDAP support, support for configuring DNS and custom OUs Azure AD Domain Services provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy, LDAP, & Kerberos/NTLM authentication that are fully compatible with Windows Server Active Directory. Setting up Azure AD Domain Services is simple. You simply toggle the service to ‘enabled’, pick a DNS domain name for your…
Marc Kean 
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