The last few weeks, I’ve been spending time with Active Directory and automating management tasks with PowerShell. If you go back a page or two of posts, you’ll see some of the scripts and functions I’ve shared. Today, I want to address something that has come up in recent comments related to tracking changes in…
Category: security
Add Logon As Service Right with PowerShell
I saw a comment on Twitter today about a limitation in PowerShell. Specifically the ability to grant the logon as a service right to a user account. Manually, if you use the Services management console and specify the user, Windows will automatically grant that right. But if you are trying to do this from a…
Resolving SIDs with WMI, WSMAN and PowerShell
In the world of Windows, an account SID can be a very enigmatic thing. Who is S-1-5-21-2250542124-3280448597-2353175939-1019? Fortunately, many applications, such as the event log viewer resolve the SID to an account name. The downside, is that when you are accessing that same type of information from PowerShell, you end up with the “raw’ SID….
Find Files with WMI and PowerShell
Finding files is one of those necessary evils for IT Pros. Sometimes we’re searching for a needle in a haystack. And it gets even more complicated when the haystacks are on 10 or 100 or 1000 remote computers. You might think using Get-ChildItem is your only option. Certainly it works, but if you are searching…
Scripting with PSCredential
I see this question often: how can I pass a parameter value for a PSCredential that might be a credential object or it might be a user name? In the past I’ve used code like this: begin { Write-Verbose -Message “Starting $($myinvocation.mycommand)” write-verbose -Message “Using volume $($volume.toUpper())” #convert credential to a PSCredential if a string…
Friday Fun Add Scripting Signing to the ISE
Today’s fun involves adding a menu item to the PowerShell ISE to make it easy to sign your scripts. I’m not going to go into the details about getting and installing a code signing certificate. I also assume you only have one installed. You can get this certificate by seasrching the CERT: PSDrive. [cc lang=”PowerShell”]…
Architecting the Right Solution for Strong Authentication
My first project with RealTime Publishers is now available. I wrote a short 3 part series on strong authentication: Architecting the Right Solution for Strong Authentication sponsored by Imprivata. Synopsis “Insufficient security is a hidden problem that many businesses are not fully aware of until it is too late. Weak authentication, silos of compliance reporting,…