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.
The phrase “automate yourself out of a job” is too easily misinterpreted as a negative. Without any context it’s possible to view it as to mean you shouldn’t automate things. If you do you’ll end up unemployed or could make others unemployed. In IT at least, this is unlikely to be true. Powershell is 10 years old later this year and if you’re not using it, here’s why you should.
I’m just starting to get my head around the concept of Containers and as such decided to take Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 for a spin, which includes Docker Containers as a feature. It’s potentially worth being more explicit here (for anyone not aware) that this isn’t Microsoft’s version of Containers, this is actually Docker baked in to Server 2016. That’s a pretty cool move on Microsoft’s part.
Previously I covered performing the installation of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 in to a desktop VM with the Desktop Experience (GUI) mode enabled. This post covers the installation of the GUI-less Server Core mode and subsequently how to manage and maintain it.
On the 27th of April 2016 Microsoft released Technical Preview 5 of Windows Server 2016. I was keen to see the new version in action, particularly since attending a talk recently on Windows Containers, which have been a feature available for testing since TP3. I am going to explore Containers in a later post, but here i’m going to cover how I chose to get the OS up and running, as when I came to do it I struggled to find a recommendation on where to test it. 1. Choose a Hypervisor
Boe Prox blogged/tweeted recently about how you can start a stopwatch in PowerShell with one line using the command [System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::StartNew(). While there are plenty of other ways to measure time in PowerShell (e.g measure-object, new-timespan), I could see an adhoc stopwatch being useful on occasion. However the raw class name is a bit clunky and forgettable. Therefore as a bit of fun I have created it as a series of functions in my PowerShell Profile.ps1 with friendly names I could call when needed.
A colleague and I recently implemented an improvement to our CloudFormation scripts which enabled the Auto Scaling Group to launch instances across more than one Availability Zone. This blog post documents the changes we made.
In Powershell the Import-Module cmdlet allows you to extend the cmdlets available to you within your script or console. This can be official extensions, such as the activedirectory module that is included with AD Tools, or custom modules you have written yourself to group together a useful set of functions or commands. This post briefly covers a few tricks i’ve discovered about import-module that i’ve found repeatedly useful.
