Mark Wragg

Windows DevOps Engineer and PowerShell fanatic. IT Contractor. Director @ MPFE Consultancy Ltd.

Recent Posts

Puppet Variables, Expressions, Facts and Hiera on Windows

7 minute read

This post is a continuation of my earlier Getting Started with Puppet on Windows post (although most of the information in this post is OS agnostic). This post explores how you can make your Puppet manifests more dynamic via the typical programming constructs of variables, expressions, conditions and iteration. It also covers Puppet’s Facter tool (for simplifying the interrogation of system info) and Hiera mechanism (for separating configuration data from your code).

Getting started with Puppet on Windows

11 minute read

This blog post describes some initial steps you can take to learn Puppet, particularly to control Windows machines. I’m currently learning Puppet via the Puppet 5 Beginners Guide (Third Edition) book by John Arundel.

A PowerShell Tool Scorecard

11 minute read

This post contains a PowerShell tool-making scorecard: a series of short questions to assess whether your custom cmdlet/function/tool is following some (generally considered) best practice design choices.

PowerShell Core 6.0

5 minute read

PowerShell now comes in two flavours, (Vanilla) Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core (..Rocky Road? ice cream flavour TBD). PowerShell Core is a version of PowerShell built on top of .NET Core. The GA version of PowerShell Core is due to be released on the 10th January and Release Candidate versions have been available for some time.

Intermittent Isilon write failures due to SMB3 Multichannel setting

7 minute read

I recently resolved an issue with our Isilon storage cluster that was causing file writes to be interrupted and fail. While diagnosing the issue I discovered that (intriguingly) the disruption was occurring at (almost) exact 10 minute intervals. Any in progress write operation occurring at that interval would fail.

Managing SSRS Subscriptions with PowerShell

8 minute read

I was recently tasked with investigating how we could store the configuration of our SQL Server Reporting Services report subscriptions in a source control and then automate the process of (later) configuring them in one or more new SSRS servers.

TILFMOL #4 - PowerShell Jobs

4 minute read

This is the fourth and final part of a short series of posts about things I discovered by reading the excellent Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches book (recently released in 3rd edition) as a not quite beginner.

TILFMOL #3 - PowerShell Remoting

4 minute read

This is part three of a short series of posts about things I discovered from reading Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches (recently released in 3rd edition).