Techie, Gamer, DevOps engineer
I have just come across this issue so noting it down for anyone else that has the same issue.
I recently encountered an issue with Windows Terminal not detecting NerdFonts for oh-my-posh, so I’m sharing a solution that might help others facing the same problem.
The issue arose on my Windows 10 laptop, and it seems to be a recent change. While I haven’t confirmed if this affects Windows 11 users, it’s something to keep in mind.
Before going on annual leave a couple of weeks ago, I dealt with migrating a static website from a 2008 IIS VM on VMWare to Azure for a customer.
Initially, after scoping and a call with the stakeholders, Storage Account was the best choice to fulfil the following criteria:
The last point came up slightly later in the process, as it was found that most of the stakeholders were non-technical and had little knowledge of “how” the site worked.
I migrated the site files up to the storage account and used a custom DNS temporarily to present a friendlier URL, although discovered soon after that storage account has a very significant feature set of IIS missing – case insensitivity for file names. Raising this with the stakeholders, and auditing the number of HTML files contained within the subfolders threw back a staggering number of 3512. If there were only a handful of actual HTML files it wouldn’t have been a big issue to rename the files. Further to that, looking into the raw HTML, even file paths use differing case (an unfortunate turn)
I made the decision to completely scrap the storage account website and instead build out App Service. The notable differences from a Storage Account being:
While App Service is more expensive (by a fair margin), it does allow a greater degree of flexibility to a solution over a Storage Account. I would have personally loved it if we were able to get it working with a Storage Account, although ensuring the sheer amount of files and folders were correctly renamed to account for the lower-case only requirement would have been too time consuming in terms of delivery constraints, as well as creating a dependency on the stakeholders to be able to resolve any issues and dependencies that arose from a mass rename action.
To summarise, Storage Account websites would be an excellent choice, provided you understand and design beforehand the necessity of only using lower case naming conventions, and you don’t have a variety of index/root pages. Usually that would be the case in this day and age, although working with migrating websites initially created 10-15+ years ago and not maintained from a developer level can lead to the same issues that I’d experienced with this migration.
This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, and here I’ll explain some of the basic methods and commands to manage WSUS solely through Powershell. No one really wants to be logging onto machines unecessarily with RDP, and these have been personally useful to me when customers have had insane hoops to jump through in order to log in (password expiry policies, Workspaces with Pins and OTP, locked behind VPNs, for example)
Synchronise WSUS with Windows Update:
(Get-WSUSServer).GetSubscription().StartSynchronisation()
Get the result of the last synchronisation:
(Get-WSUSServer).GetSubscription().GetLastSynchronisation()
These two are useful if you would prefer to power down WSUS servers outside of company patch windows (e.g. monthly patch cycles) to save on costs, as the Update DB on the server wont be up to date all of the time.
Another useful command is to list all the computers managed by WSUS:
Get-WsusComputer -All
And to filter to specific instances, for example if you wanted to check if they were being managed:
Get-WsusComputer -NameIncludes "ComputerName"
Finally, to clear out old machines that have either been decomissioned or no longer exist (especially useful if you still manage ASG instances or scaleset VMs with WSUS, though I would recommend you use Patch Management/Automation Accounts instead)
Get-WsusServer "computername" | Invoke-WsusServerCleanup -CleanupObsoleteComputers -CleanupObsoleteUpdates
That about wraps up basic admin tasks. You can get really in-depth with scripting for WSUS, although I personally haven’t gone that deep into it either. As above, we’ve moved on from managing static infrastructure and are now using Patch Management in AWS and Automation Accounts in Azure for Windows patch management. It really takes the pain away and gets rid of one extra VM to manage.
For a full listing of available commands, punch in:
Get-Command -Module UpdateServices
Or view these online on the MS Documentation page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/updateservices
Easy enough, right?
Of course, you can use any of these commands in conjunction with Enter-PSSession, SSM in AWS or Cloud Shell in Azure to connect to a Powershell console on the VM/instance.
Tonight, I have finished probably one of the best games that I’ve played in the past two years, Detroit: Become Human.
The story is well layered and follows 3 protagonists on their journey to achieve freedom. Markus, coming from a home of a wealthy artist in Lance Henriksen’s Carl Manfred. Markus and Carl have a father/son relationship, despite Markus being an android.
Kara, who is an AX400 android model designed to take care of children and household duties (cooking, cleaning, etc)
Connor, a specialist range of android designed to assist in Police investigations – who is hunting deviant androids (think Ryan Gosling’s character in Blade Runner 2049)
There are a number of important topics and themes covered in the game such as racism, (sexual) minorities, biased media coverage and fear mongering. In this article in particular I wanted to write about Kara, and some of the media coverage that has been garnering attention to the game.
I came across this as I was trying to install inspec to run against some Packer builds. The Github documentation only covers how to install inspec, and not the pre-requisites.
You likely experienced an error such as “[…] requires installed build tools” and you may try to run gem install buildtools
However, What you need to do is download the Ruby developer kit from https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ (found at the bottom of the page). You can unzip this wherever you like (I unzipped it to my Ruby install directory in a folder called devkit). From there, press SHIFT and right click, to open a command prompt window at that location. Now type:
ruby dk.rb init
and
ruby dk.rb install
The full output for these commands is below:
C:\Ruby23\devkit>ruby dk.rb init [INFO] found RubyInstaller v2.3.3 at C:/Ruby23 Initialization complete! Please review and modify the auto-generated 'config.yml' file to ensure it contains the root directories to all of the installed Rubies you want enhanced by the DevKit. C:\Ruby23\devkit>ruby dk.rb install [INFO] Installing 'C:/Ruby23/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.3.0/rubygems/defaults/operating_system.rb' [INFO] Installing 'C:/Ruby23/lib/ruby/site_ruby/devkit.rb'
Now, you can go ahead and
gem install inspec
Which will begin the installation.
Something that’s been driving me crazy recently is the excessive amount of notifications that pop up (and play a sound repeatedly) when I log in to my home PC.
Somehow, turning down the system volume does nothing to stop the obnoxiousness of the alert.
Luckily, there’s an easy, no fuss way to disable this!
Hoping this helps to save the sanity of others (and their PCs/laptops from being thrown out of windows!)
It’ s been a long, long time since I last posted on here. There’s a good reason for that.
I’ve started a new job working in DevOps. A lot of my friends will know that’s the direction I was aiming for, though I was quite a way away from having the necessary experience to make the transition from 2nd/3rd line server support, into infrastructure support, and then into DevOps.
I was contacted by a recruiter one day, and the prospect seemed almost too good to be true. I managed to make it to an interview and was told that, being that it’s a junior role, not having any experience in the tools that they used was perfectly fine. Accepting the position was an easy choice to make. Probably the easiest choice that I’ve had in life thus far.
The team was brand new, focusing more on the Windows side of DevOps in AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Even so, as just a junior, the learning curve was incredibly steep but wholly rewarding.
6 months on and I’ve grown pretty confident in my skills of writing Terraform modules. Within a few months I had written my first without assistance (in total I’ve created 3 Terraform modules, and made numerous functionality additions to existing code). I’ve completed a really interesting project recently, and in doing so I seem to have created something that no one else has done before – or at least – it hasn’t been fully documented with all the intricate nuances that I’ve experienced in the process.
I’ll be doing a write-up of that soon. Hopefully, it can be of help to someone else.
The Windows 10 rollouts from Microsoft has finally picked up traction. My opinion of Windows 10 has greatly improved due to the cross-platform availability of XBOX One games.
However, due to the adoption of an app-like structure, this has posed it’s own problems.
You may find that you’re not able to open built-in programs that you were able to use without any issues in Windows 8, for example.
Luckily! There’s a simple fix for this!
Please note, this fix applies to Windows 10 Professional versions and above.
This fix applies to Windows 10 Home versions
Unfortunately home versions don’t have a local security policy editor, so we’ll have to resort to editing the registry to achieve the desired effect.
If you don’t feel confident in making changes to the registry, I’ve attached a link to a file below that you can download, Double click, and apply the registry changes automatically.
File: Registry item (hosted on MediaFire)
It’s a known fact that helpdesks are overwhelmed and the retention rate of helpdesk staff can be as low as 50%. Good managers will identify why this is and take steps to correct it – providing benefits, better salaries, or training opportunities. There is also another big – and preventable – cause of helpdesk turnover, and that’s the sheer quantity of mundane and repetitive tasks in addition to legitimate support calls, that can cause them to feel overwhelmed if there’s a high volume of tickets that need to be worked on. These tasks can vary from company to company but some examples could be:
We had a client who was experiencing high usage on one of their TS servers last week, and I was asked to compile and export a list of users on each TS to send to the client so we could move people around. I found a handy Powershell cmdlet that let me do this really easily, as well as being able to export to file.
Simply put, it’s this:
Get-ADGroupMember -identity GroupName | Export-csv -pathC:\GroupMembers.csv -NoTypeInformation
The first section, Get-ADGroupMember -identity GroupName is where you specify the name of the group that you want to obtain the list of members for
We have the pipe, to signify an extra command linked to the first, in this case, we want to export the results to a csv file called GroupMembers.csv
The -NoTypeInformation switch just removes an unecessary line from the start of the csv.
More information on the export-csv command, including additional switches can be found on Microsoft TechNet – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh849932.aspx
