Powershell version 4 and Windows 8.1 / 2012 R2 introduced the Test-NetConnection command as a tool for performing network connectivity tests with Powershell. Test-NetConnection allows you to perform ping, traceroute and TCP port tests and from Windows 10 and Server 2016 onward introduces the ability to do “Diagnose Routing” tests with the same cmdlet.
I like my scripts to give feedback to the console to demonstrate progress where possible and Powershell provides a number of cmdlets to do this, one of which is Write-Progress.
If you’re looking for a way to interrogate multiple HTTP Transaction Sensors in your PRTG monitoring installation using a script then this blog post is for you.
The following script can be used to get the current uptime from a collection of servers in Active Directory using WMI. I used it as a way to audit our estate, keen to understand how long servers have been operational for, in part to identify those which were potentially not routinely receiving Windows Updates.
My team has an ever-growing collection of administration scripts and tools which are organised and maintained within a number of Git repositories. In order to ensure that the copies of these scripts in production always reflect the Master branch in Source Control we set up a Chef cookbook to synchronise the repositories to a network share in the environment. This post details how this functionality was developed and deployed.
Irwin Strachan published a Pester script for Operational Testing of Active Directory back in April which I was keen to try out. Afterwards I extended the script to add some additional health checks of Active Directory and this post explains how the resultant combination of our work can be used to validate your Active Directory.
I recently implemented a Powershell module to send notifications in to our Hipchat rooms. This post explains how that script works and why this was an important shift for how we handle notifications.
Recently while writing a script I expected two commands I was calling to throw exceptions because I expected my script to be unable to remotely connect to some of my servers. Initially I handled the result of these exceptions with If..Else blocks, but it felt like a Try..Catch might be more appropriate.
