Dmitry's PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond

PowerShell Dinner at TechEd Europe

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:51:52 +0000

Aleksandar has just posted the pictures he took at the PowerShell community dinner in Berlin on November 11.

PowerShell Dinners are amazingly fun community events we have more or less at each major Microsoft conference and which gather members of the PowerShell team at Microsoft, MVPs, vendors in the PowerShell ecosystem, and just active members of the PowerShell community.

Unfortunately, this year not everyone could make it to TechEd. However, still, chances are that this photo album will show you a few faces behind the names you come across every day of your PowerShell life.

Systems Management with NetPoint and PowerGUI

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:53:09 +0000

Need a simple and affordable way to manage your Windows systems in batch? Shannon Ma from NetPoint has just posted a free PowerPack which integrates with NetPoint PowerShell interfaces and lets you easily inventory your network.

The PowerPack can work with both free and commercial version of NetPoint (guess, which one gives you more functionality ) and provides a great way to collect various information from computers on your network, as well as install/unistall software, do restarts, run commands, and so on – all in all about 30 various tasks:

Read more, leave your feedback and download the PowerPack here.

Is IIS 7 Console Based on PowerShell?

Dmitry Sotnikov — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:53:57 +0000

Now it is. However, this is not the native management console coming with IIS, but a free PowerPack which Adam Murray posted here.

Not only you can see (and modify) the PowerShell code behind everything the tool is doing, you will enjoy just using the console and all the great features it has, including for example:

Create, rename, copy and delete application pools
Configure all app pool properties
Create, rename, copy and delete web sites
Create, rename, copy and delete ftp sites
Set various site properties
View and manage worker processes
View and manage IIS services
Manage site bindings
Creates the various enum types from the IIS schema to allow the use of dropdowns for configuring properties

To learn about all its features, see screenshots and download the actual tool go to the IIS 7 powerpack page.

And don’t forget about other great PowerPacks Adam have created in the past for WebSphere MQ and SQL Reporting Services PowerPack.

3 days left to submit your PowerPack

Dmitry Sotnikov — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:00:57 +0000

What are you waiting for? Install PowerGUI, watch this video, follow this tutorial, create the PowerPack of your dream and win one of the prizes!

This is really easy, fun, and a great way to have your own IT dreams (and dreams of many IT professionals out there in the community) come true.

The deadline is November 15. Details can be found here.

PowerShell-Based console for SMS 2003

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:42:38 +0000

Are you running Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 and want to have it fully scriptable in PowerShell?

Check out this wonderful SMS/ConfigMgr PowerPack David Moravec put together.

It lets you browse all your SMS configuration and among other things:

List members of collection
See package properties
See programs inside the package
See distribution points where the package is replicated
Refresh package on distribution points
See advertisements assigned to colection
See your site structure in dynamic nodes (as tree)
Reports listed by specific categories
Go to some predefined web pages (e.g. myITforum.com)
See overall health of your site

And as always with PowerPacks – this one shows all the PowerShell code behind it, lets you customize and tweak it, gives bulk operations, filtering, reporting aand so on!

Download the pack from here and let David know what you think!

Are you also into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier? Go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

PowerPack Creation Manual

Dmitry Sotnikov — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:03:07 +0000

Kirk has published a pretty extensive reference manual on PowerPacks (PowerGUI add-ons), what they are, how to customize them, and how to create the ones of your own.

Great timing considering that you still have 5 days to create a PowerPack and submit it to the PowerPack Challenge!

Check out the document here.

New enterprise PKI management console

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:32:18 +0000

Certificate management used to be tough. There have not been a single tool to manage all the aspects of it and administrators had to launch all these certsrv.msc, certtmpl.msc, certutil.exe, ocsp.msc, pkiview.msc, and so on. We had no bulk operations, had to manage each certificate authority (CA) in a separate MMC snapin, and so on.

That is now all a thing in the past with the new PowerGUI/PowerShell-based certificate management admin console created by PowerShell MVP Vadims Podāns (here’s English translation of his blog) and shared for free here.

Here’s a very quick summary of some of the features his tool has:

Certificate Authorities management:
- CRL Distribution Points (CDP)
- Authority Information Access (AIA) settings
- Review CRLs
- Publish new CRLs
- Change CRL publishing periods including overlap settings
- Revoked Certificates
- Issued Certificates
- Pending requests
- Failed requests
- Issued certificate templates
- Revoke/unrevoke certificates
- Issue or deny pending requests for certificates
- Add/remove certificate templates to issue
- Change CRL/CRT/OCSP URL priorities
Local certificate store management:
- Import/Export certificates using various certificate types (such CER/pkcs12/pkcs7/SST)
- Copy/move certificates between stores
- Delete certificate from store
- Validate certificates passing them through certificate chaining engine
- Sign files
Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Responders management
- Review and change OCSP Responder settings
- Change OCSP URL priorities

All of these support bulk operations, filtering, and reporting. All are available with their source PowerShell code for your reference and scripting.

Could you ask for more? Please submit your feedback to Vadims – this will help him improve the pack.

Read more about the pack, see the screenshots, and download the tool here.

Are you also into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier – go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

Virtu-Al PowerPack – A must-have tool for VMware

Dmitry Sotnikov — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:59:02 +0000

PowerPack Challenge 2009 got its first contestant and it is absolutely fantastic.

If you are an administrator managing VMware infrastructure – this is a great free addition to your arsenal. Just look at the screenshot of the navigation tree. The tool is just an amazing collection of super-useful reports on VMware hosts, guest machines, datacenter, resource pools and clusters, and goes beyond that by adding licensing information and even a virtualization tip of the day!

You can download Alan’s PowerPack here. Read more about the pack and send your feedback here.

Good thing there’s more than one prize for the contest. So if you are into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier – go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

PowerPack Challenge: The Winning Strategy

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

Post early and actively collect and incorporate feedback – and you can substantially increase your chances of winning the first prize in the PowerPack Challenge 2009.

Here’s how Jonathan Medd got his Best PowerPack award last year (in 2008):

He posted his Exchange 2003 PowerPack really early when the contest was only starting.
The pack got tons of interest, was featured in podcasts and blogs, and Jonathan received a lot of feedback and even contributions from Shay and Aleksandar.
He kept incorporating feedback and contributions throughout the contest.
By the contest deadline, his PowerPack got well ahead of more recent entries in both quality and feature richness.

So if you have something in the works – be agile. Go ahead and post it. Tell the world, get feedback, and keep improving what you’ve got.

Read more about the contest here. Participate, have fun, win great prizes!

Video on creating a PowerPack

Dmitry Sotnikov — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:00:06 +0000

If you are considering participating in the PowerPack Challenge contest (which you should ) this quick video by Darin will help you get started:

Darin walks you through the process of customizing PowerGUI admin console, exporting the new functionality as a PowerPack, and sharing it on the web.

Check it out,
Think about what you do day to day at work and what would be the graphical console of your dream,
Create it,
Submit it to the contest,
And become one of the winners!