I write a lot of PowerShell scripts for application installations, and many download the install files from a URL. Because the URL is hardcoded in the scripts, if the URL changes, I need to update all the scripts. This exact issue happened to me a few years ago, and my solution at the time was…
If you accidentally delete something in Active Directory, it can be difficult to undo. Fortunately, you can enable a recycle bin for Active Directory, making life much easier if you need to restore something. The Active Directory Recycle Bin (sometimes called ADRB) was first introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2. You need to enable it…
The way I manage my email might seem a bit strange. Due to working in IT, I get lots of emails. Some emails need action, some are regular emails, and some are notifications I want to know about as soon as they happen. I feel like a normal person would make an Outlook rule to…
Usually, when you want to control the Windows Update settings, you create a GPO to manage the settings or tweak some registry entries. Both methods alter the registry values in the registry key To reset any custom Windows Update settings, I nuke out that registry key or reverse the GPO or both, and restart the…
Active Directory is very much a database. It even has a schema to define what can and can’t be created and how everything is related and linked. An oversimplification is that the Active Directory schema is the rules about the types of items you can make in Active Directory, and this also includes the available…
A while back, Microsoft added a feature to SharePoint Online called Add shortcut to OneDrive. This feature adds a shortcut to the file or folder in another SharePoint site directly in your OneDrive. The Add shortcut to OneDrive feature is on by default. Depending on your setup, you may want to turn the Add shortcut…
When using VMware vCenter, you may only occasionally need a configuration backup of each VMware ESXi host. However, there are some situations where having a config backup of each ESXi host is nice to have. I didn’t want to back up each ESXi host manually, as it doesn’t scale well. Instead, I created a PowerShell…
Windows Autopilot uses several mechanisms to function. A common one is the device’s hardware hash, also called the hardware ID. There are several ways to gather the hardware ID from a device to use in Windows Autopilot. In this post, I will show step-by-step how to get the hardware ID from a system with PowerShell…
In the past, I’ve made a few one-off PowerShell scripts to set various registry settings. I find myself needing to do this more and more. I’ve always just forced my registry settings with no regard to whether the settings were already correct. A perfect example of this is my PowerShell script to Disable Auto Windows…
Microsoft has stopped deploying the original version of Microsoft Teams (now called Microsoft Teams Classic) with new Microsoft 365 apps installs. I’ve been using New Microsoft Teams for quite a while now and I honestly can’t tell the difference between the two anymore. An issue I do have with New Teams is that it doesn’t…
