The Lonely Administrator

A new whitepaper I wrote for Quest Software has finally made it’s public appearance: PowerShell in the Enterprise: Best Practices and Recommendations. The paper discusses some best practices for using PowerShell in an enterprise environment. Essentially, getting the most from your PowerShell “investment”, especially when you might have multiple PowerShell-based administrators. Although certainly the suggestions [...]

I’m busy polishing my presentations and demos for next week’s Techmentor conference in sunny Orlando, Fl. I’ve been presenting at Techmentor for a number of years now and it is a great show for administrators searching for answers to the problems and challenges they face today. You get intimate sessions with industry experts like Don [...]

You have probably heard the story (or legend) about Pablo Picasso and his napkin drawing. A guy goes up to Picasso in a cafe and asks for an autograph or something. Picasso sketches out something in a minute or so. He turns to the guy and says, “That will be $10,000".”  The guy is [...]

I’ve recently started using the Server Core option for my test servers, especially for things like domain controllers. I can get by with smaller disk and memory requirements. Once you get the server configured, there’s very little you have to do that actually requires logging on to the server. Which is good because all you [...]

Last summer, Ed Wilson was looking for help with a small part of the book he was finishing up, Windows PowerShell 2.0 Best Practices. The topic he was working on was, “How do I know this script is safe to run?” Which is a great question and one with greater significance as more administrators come [...]

I’ve been doing a lot with the ActiveDirectory module that ships with Windows Server 2008 R2 and which you can also use with the Remote Server Administration Tools on WIndows 7.  As I was trying things out with the PSDrive provider I discovered something very cool.

Last week I was helping someone out in the PowerShell forum at ScriptingAnswers.com. The specific problem is irrelevant;l however I  learned something in the process that will affect how I write my own PowerShell functions from now on. Not being a developer I never picked up on this subtle (at least to me) distinction. Here’s [...]