At Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021 it was announced that Windows Admin Center was now available for Azure VMs through the portal. This post covers how to configure that new feature in PowerShell.

A surprise one from your friendly neighbourhood IT Support this afternoon. A laptop running Windows 10 has started playing back all the sound picked up by the Microphone- my voice was being echoed back (with a slight delay) even when no applications were running.

Troubleshooting connectivity between application and database servers in Azure.

This snippet takes the export of the Windows Security log and returns a list of user ids from within it.

A quick script that came up in response to a situation where I wanted to know the date a workstation on the network was last built without visiting the machine or interrupting the currently logged on user. PowerShell to the rescue!

Support for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ends in January 2020- just two years from the date of this post. Four years ago I put up a script to find XP and 2003 VMs, and I’ve modified this to search a vSphere environment for powered on VMs running Server 2008 as a Guest OS: 1Get-VM | 2 Where {$_.PowerState -eq …

Using the manage-bde command you can check the Bitlocker encryption status on both the local Windows computer but also remote devices on the local area network. For example, to check the encryption status of the C: drive on the computer “WS12345” the following command could be used 1manage-bde -status -computername …

A regular ping command is great for checking if Host A can see Host B, but what if we want to go a bit deeper- for example check if a web server is contactable on port 80 and 443? The PowerShell cmdlet Test-NetConnection is a great tool for doing this.