This is my first screencast (ever!), and I am hoping to do more on PowerShell, and anything related to PowerShell. In this first screencast, I'm going to do a demo of JAMS: JAMS (Job Access & Management System) is a commercial software product that provides job scheduling for Windows, OpenVMS, UNIX and Linux systems. As of a few months ago, it ...

I think Windows PowerShell is one of the greatest things to have been released recently (yes, I am a poshoholic). At TechEd 2007 last June in Orlando, a lot of people were talking about PowerShell.  Ben Pearce put together a list of the top 5 questions he was asked while doing demos.  I will leave it up to you to check out the ...

One of the trickiest things to do when working with computes remotely is reboot them. We also have to make sure that the computers don't have any bios issues that can cause them to not restart. Many times we can't even get logged on if their Terminal Services access is shut off. With this trick you can reboot a server with ease, even one that ...

PowerShell allows you to read, write and update Active Directory Objects. In conjunction with PowerShell's many other advanced features this provides a great environment to manage your AD, and to automate tasks. To Create a user object: First we need to set a variable to hold the domain object, and link the instance to the domain. PS C:\> ...

As you might have guessed I'm a lazy admin :) Now being a lazy admin doesn't mean I sit around pondering whether captain Kirk is better than Captain Picard, and all the while, hope somebody is taking care of what I'm supposed to be doing. It means I work smarter not harder. Yes I know 2 clichés in the same paragraph. And everyone knows Picard is ...

PowerShell lets you do some really neat stuff. Today were going to look at some of the tools available that can make script writing easier. First there is the built in ability to evaluate expressions: You can also store the output of these expressions into variables: We can also make arrays of variables. An array is just a collection of ...

Ever want to record a set of commands you are entering into a PowerShell session?  Well you can with the Start-Transcript cmdlet!  When you run this cmdlet, every command you enter, and its output is logged to a TXT file and you can review it later.  Open up PowerShell and enter the following command Start-Transcript Now enter ...

Hello everyone! Just a quick update to let you know that Powershell is now available for Windows Vista, 32 and 64 bit! Read the PowerShell Intro articles, and install it today! Download PowerShell for Vista Here

Continuing our look at Powershell we are going finalize our brief introduction with the sort object. As I mentioned in the previous Powershell article the sort object allows any Powershell output to be sorted consistently using the same logic and syntax structure. While this might not be remarkable at first, if you consider how you sorted data ...

PowerShell offers a number ways to export data, one of the easiest to read is in an HTML file. The ConvertTo-HTML cmdlet allows you to export your data requests to a portable HTML file. In the following examples I am going to take one of the previous commands we looked at in an earlier PowerShell article called Get-Process which lists all ...

Our First Stop on the road to PowerShell “gurudom” is to learn about the foundation of Powershell. One of the key elements of PowerShell that makes it so Powerfull is the way you can interact with objects using the command line. An object is an entity that can describes itself, and what it does. The object contains data structures or Properties, ...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary has several definitions for the word lazy. While I believe that most of the definitions do not apply to TheLazyAdmin, This one is fitting: “Disinclined to activity or exertion” So what does this definition have to do with being a LazyAdmin, and Powershell? Let me tell you. As you may know there are many tasks that ...

MSH is highly customizable through the use of profiles. MSH profiles are not created by default, however, you can create them easily enough and customize your MSH enviroment. To create a MSH profile, simply open up a text editor, enter in the variables you wish to include in your customization and save the file as My Documents\MSH\profile.msh. The ...

The event log is full of information that can be very useful in troubleshooting. Unfortunatley, it is also full of information that just gets in the way and makes finding things more difficult. There are features within Event Viewer to sort the logs, and there are also 3rd party tools to manage them, but you can also use MSH to manage your event ...

PowerShell, also know as Microsoft Shell or Monad is a new shell combining a command line interface and scripting language. MSH is going to change the way Exchange administrators work when E12 is released, however, there is a lot MSH can do for Exchange 2003 administrators. If you read the other MSH articles I have written you are already familiar ...