POWERSHELL DECONSTRUCTED
In this post, I'll outline my own such PowerShell adventure, and show you the tools I used to come out the other side with a working solution. We'll meet in basecamp to prepare ourselves with the needed gear, plan our scaling strategy and climb the crags of an unknown PowerShell module. We'll belay into treacherous canyons, using our torch to reveal the DLLs that make Windows work, then chart new ground using DotPeek and eventually arrive on the summit, victorious and armed with new tools. Continue Reading...
Extracting and monitoring web content with PowerShell
This kind of request comes up **all the time** on StackOverflow and /r/PowerShell. > 'How can I extract content from a webpage using PowerShell'. And it's an interesting problem to solve. However, nothing motivates like greed, and I recently revisited this topic in order to help me track down the newest must-have item, the Switch. Continue Reading...
Advanced Autocompletion: adding output types
You know how in PowerShell you can type a cmdlet, then pipe into `Select-Object` or another cmdlet and start tabbing through property names? This is the type of Autocompletion we are going to add to our function in this post! Continue Reading...
Lessons on ProcMon and how to force On-screen keyboard
Recently, I had a customer looking at setting up potentially tens of thousands of Point of Sale Kiosks running Windows 10 on an LTSB branch. We wanted users to have to input their password, but noticed that if a Windows 10 machine is in the docking station, the Touch Keyboard will never display! Paradoxically, if the user has a Windows Hello Pin specified, that version of the touch keyboard will appear. But for a regular password? Nope, no On-Screen Keyboard. And using the dated compatibility keyboard (OSK.exe) was not an option. In this post, we'll use pinvoke to find a way to make it happen. Continue Reading...
SOLVED! Windows 10 Reset - There was a problem resetting your PC
Windows 10 built on the awesome features of Windows 8, and brought over the very powerful 'Refresh My PC' and 'Reset My PC' options. Truly awesome, they're able to refresh the base OS and forklift over your files, giving you that 'just installed' smell we all love so much. I love that smell so much in fact, that I buy a new car every few weeks, or sometimes sleep in cars at the CarMax down the road from my house. Mmmmm plastic and leather offgas. However, sometimes things go awry, and from no fault of our own, we can end up with a system which will refuse to either reset or refresh. Read on to see how to fix this problem. Continue Reading...
Is WinRM Secure or do I need HTTPs?
One of the things I absolutely love about my job is being thrown into the deep end of the rapids with little to no time to prepare given the opportunity to try new things and new technologies, pushing me out of my comfort zone. It normally goes _okay_. Case in point: a client of ours recently was investigating WinRM and whether or not it was secure, leading me down a rabbit hole of Certificates, Enterprise CA's, SSL Handshakes, WireShark and more. Continue Reading...
