I am a member of a terrific IT User group, Carolina IT Professional Group. This group is focused on educating its members, and giving back to the community. But what really keeps people to the end are the terrific door prizes. At the July meeting, I won a copy of Server 2012 R2. I had…
Author: Alan
See https://www.akaplan.com/about/
PowerShell GUI for AD Recycle Bin
This blog post has been replaced by my guest appearance in the Hey, Scripting Guy blog. Please follow it to find my post and link to the script.
Get the Long File Name from the Short File Name
I get some reports which give the path to files as an 8.3 DOS “short” file name, filled with tildes and numbers, such as “c:\progra~2\wid6e1~1\v3.5\sqmapi.dll” for the file “c:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Identity Foundation\v3.5\SqmApi.dll”. It is easy to go from the long file name to the short file name with a script. What is less easy…
Finding the Renamed Domain Admin Account
A good practice is to rename the domain administrator account in an Active Directory domain. When doing auditing, you will want to know what the name of that account really is. Get-DomainAdmin.ps1 is a script which will give you this information for any domain in your forest. It requires the ActiveDirectory module to run.
Get Holidays for Any Year and Any Country as PowerShell Object
This script started out as a project to figure out how to automate Excel web queries in PowerShell, so MS Excel is a prerequisite for this script. If you have Excel, but have never used query tables, it is accessible by going to the Data tab, and then choosing “From Web”. An overview from TechRepublic…
Combine Multiple Excel Spreadsheets
I create a lot of Excel audit reports in a multi-domain environment. When they go out, I need to combine the reports from each domain into a single Excel workbook with multiple worksheets. I found some VBA code on mrexcel.com which was pretty easy to port to vbscript. I put the script on the desktop…
Remote Windows Update 3.1
Looking for a script to run Windows Update remotely? WindowsUpdate.hta version 3.1 is an HTML application which allows you to connect to a remote machine, determine what patches it requires from Windows Update, and install the patches. You can schedule a reboot time. This version allows you to look at he Windows Update log,…
Get Distinguished Name of Many computers in PowerShell (Revised)
Getting the DN for an individual computer is not a difficult task in PowerShell, ex: Import-Module activedirectory $(Get-ADComputer $env:COMPUTERNAME).distinguishedName Doing this fast for a long list of machines in a big forest is less easy. Get-ComputerDN.ps1 gets the distinguished name of a list of computers using WorkFlows. I spent some time trying out how to figure…
A Cookie is Not a Virus — A BitDefender Rant
I can only guess that BitDefender is trying to make itself look good by falsely identifying cookies as malware. They may be annoying, they may affect your privacy, but they aren’t “infected”. Crap like this will make me buy a from a different vendor next time.
Batch file to Run PowerShell Scripts
I have a couple of PowerShell scripts which I run daily, and the number keeps growing. I wanted a quick way to run scripts which support alternate credentials. Drag and drop a PowerShell script onto the RunPS.cmd batch and you are prompted to run with it with your current credentials, alternate credentials, using RunAs, or…