SpiceWorld 2013
Really excited that I’ll be attending Spiceworld 2013 this year. I’ve been using Spiceworks software since 2009 and been very active in their community most of that time but this is the first time I’ve attended their yearly conference. I think it will be a great way to meet a lot of the people I’ve been interacting with for years but couldn’t tell you what they look like to save my life!
I’m also excited to be working with another Spicehead, Rob Dunn, on the Introduction to PowerShell 3.0 breakout session. Rob and I are working hard to present PowerShell to beginners and hopefully cut down some of that initial learning curve that no doubt exists for newbies. We really wanted to give a hands-on experience to learning PowerShell too, so no endless list of slide’s and lecture. Our plan is to present 2, 3 maybe 4 slides than just sit in front of a PC and write a script with the whole group. We’ll have to guide the script a bit as we only have an hour, but the idea is to present 3 different script ideas and let the group decide which script we’ll write. From there we’ll show you how you can use PowerShell itself to help you write the script–bouncing from the shell to the ISE and back again until we have a rough little script written.
I’ve never done anything like this, and I’m thankful that Rob will be with me. Rob has been with Spiceworks even longer than I have and written some great scripts. His expertise is mostly with vbScript, which I think is really nice as he can bring that perspective to the PowerShell experience. I’ve written quite a lot in vbScript too so it’s nice that we can speak the “short-hand”, without translating back and forth between languages! It’s also been exciting that we both seem to have the same ideas–so far!–on what and how we want to do this so we can really focus on trying to bring the best and most interesting session we can. Nothing worse than sitting there and having some guy sit behind a desk and drone on, essentially reading his slide deck to you! This will NOT be that. We’re going to be sitting with a PC on the screen writing the script with you. Explaining why we do things the way we do them, and running into the same problems you would run into while writing a script and solving the problems right there.
So come down to Austin and join us at Spiceworld, find out what’s really happening in the world of the SMB and maybe learn a little PowerShell along the way.
Using Powershell to get Adapter Information
Had an interesting thread come through on Spiceworks the other day that required some detective work with WMI. In the past, when I did WMI calls with vbScript I usually had to Google it and find someone else who’d done what I wanted to do and modify their script. But with Powershell you don’t have to dig through different blogs, or try to slog through the MSDN documentation, now you can just inspect the data and do it directly. Here’s what I did.
Spiceworks Reporting and Powershell
The Spiceworks reporting engine is pretty good, and the web interface they developed for it will meet a lot of your needs. And with the ability to share your reports with others there are literally thousands of reports out there for you to choose from. Then they introduced SQL based reporting and really opened up what you could do. But wouldn’t it be nice to bring that data into Powershell? Read on to see how you can do this.
Random Thoughts – Spiceworks, WordPress and more
Couple of random thoughts I wanted to write about on Spiceworks, WordPress and Powershell.org
New User Automation – Part 2
In Part 1 of New User Automation we looked at creating the user account in Active Directory, copying all of the properties we needed and adding the new user to all of the proper groups. Now we need to create the home directory, set the permissions and finally update the Spiceworks ticket with the information we created.
Using Spiceworks Forums
Wanted to do a light, non-Powershell post today about the Spiceworks forums.
Get Service Information for a List of Computers
Today was a great example of how something that should be really easy with a computer turns out to be hard. Even in Powershell this happens. Case in point: on Spiceworks today a guy named dhubbard posted a vbScript that got a bunch of information about Windows services. It could be run against multiple servers from a simple text file.
Restart-Computers with Firm Confirmation
I’m always on the look out for new PowerShell projects. Doesn’t much matter if they’re little projects–like this one–or big ones–like The DFS Monitor With History. This is why I’m always on the Spiceworks IT Programming forums and PowerGui.org’s forums.
Today I ran across a little script someone was writing in batch and I decided to write it in PowerShell for a couple of reasons. I had not really played with the Read-Host functionality yet and I wanted to play with the built-in documentation functionality of PowerShell which I discovered while on vacation. Yes, I read PowerShell stuff while on vacation, it’s a weakness (so far I’ve been able to hold off on the PowerShell reference app for the iPad, but not sure how much longer)!!
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