I tend to rebuild my home lab a few times a year; sometimes it is to try out a new process (e.g. scripted installs, upgrade paths, etc.), but more often than not it is because I have broken something so bad that it is just easier to restart. As part of that, I usually try to restore some key VMs from backup. However, the bigger struggle there is keeping my backup jobs up to date. ...
A tool that I have been aware of for awhile now, but haven’t paid too much attention to (until recently) is Chocolatey. What is it, you may be asking yourself? It is essentially a package manager for Windows that is run via the command line. Various ‘flavours’ are available, ranging from free (which is what I use) to paid options. At the moment, there are 4343 community maintained packages, so you’ll likely find at some of what you need there. ...
There are several tasks that I find myself doing often enough (not necessarily daily), to warrant automation. But even more so, it is those tasks that I don’t necessarily do often where I really appreciate the automation. Part of it is because of the time savings, but even more so, if it is automated, there are a lot fewer steps that I need to remember. A good example of this is employee terminations. A simple, but typical workflow that I see is along the lines of: ...
The Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) I’m not as hands on with my infrastructure as I used to be (due to promotion and expansion of roles), but along with that I do find my time is far more valuable now. With that in mind, I made a conscious effort to learn at least some basic PowerShell commands for often requested tasks. I found myself wasting a lot of time opening ADUC, finding the user / OU I was looking for, and doing whatever task was required (ex. adding to a group, resetting password, disable password expiration, etc.). Prior to Office 365, we were on a hosted Exchange 2007 platform and did not have PowerShell access. One of the big motivators for the switch was to open up scripting access so that we could start to see time savings. ...