The Lonely Administrator

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 [...]

Last week I was interviewed on the Mind of Root podcast about what administrators can do to promote PowerShell and automation in their environments. The show is now available for streaming or download. I still think your best approach is to gently let everyone know that it’s not a matter of if you will use [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This morning I helped out a fellow scripter in the PowerShell forum at ScriptingAnswers.com. He was trying to figure out an Exchange 2007 problem. He wanted to update a property value, but keep the existing property values. This seems a like a reasonable request and one that isn’t limited to Exchange. There are plenty of [...]

A challenge many new comers to PowerShell face, especially those arriving with a VBScript background, and one that I often talk about, is shifting gears from working with text to working with objects. Here’s a good example.

My December Mr. Roboto column is now online This month’s tool is a PowerShell WinForm script that uses WMI to compress files. I used PrimalForms 2009 to build the graphical interface. The interface is essentially a wizard that lets you build a WMI query to find files and compress them. 

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