Steven Datt

Category: Guides

  • Installing Inspec for RubyGems on Windows

    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.

  • Exporting AD group members using Powershell

    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