Hi! So this is the final post of this year. I’m going to be enjoying some well deserved holidays and spend Christmas with my family. The past year has been pretty cool. I’ve been doing so many cool projects. I figured I also would list the top blogs of this year by views, and just…
Category
Automation
Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring the creation of new teams.
Since my last blog about the Secure App Model I’ve been playing with using it in different cases such as collecting automatic documentation, but also using it as an early warning tool for events our helpdesk might want to monitor. One of these tasks is monitoring the creation of new Teams. We like keeping our…
Connect to Exchange Online automated when MFA is enabled (Using the SecureApp Model)
So in the past months Microsoft has been forcing CSPs and MSPs to use MFA, something I strongly encourage and am glad with. The only issue with this was that Microsoft made this move without accounting for automation and automated jobs that need to run, especially jobs that run unattended and over multiple delegates. To…
Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring Office365 admin password changes
So when I was at Dattocon I was approached by an MSP that was using his RMM system to alert on changes of the local admin password, as he wanted to be updated every time a local admin got a new password. He did this by using an older script of mine below. Monitoring Local…
Dattocon!
Hi all, I’ll be presenting at Dattocon next week, so I will not be able to release the new blogs about monitoring with PowerShell. If you’re coming to Dattocon feel free to join my session. you can find information about the session here. The description is a little bit off as I will be talking…
Monitoring with PowerShell: The Windows Firewall
In a lot of situations where we take over server management from clients we often see bad security practices, where the client does not understand the inherent risk and just wants everything to work. Some administrators that don’t know what they are doing often just disable the entire firewall and hope that their application works…
Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring Office C2R updates
This blog might be a little shorter than normally, I’ve been a bit swamped with work so if you have any questions, let me know! This time we’re going to monitor the update status of Microsoft Office that’s been installed using C2R. C2R installers do not get updates from the Microsoft Update services and thus…
Monitoring with PowerShell: UPS Status (APC, Generic, and Dell)
So we’re using several types of UPS’s at our clients, and sometimes bump into generic USB UPS systems too. To monitor these we use a couple of methods that all have benefits and downsides. Let’s get started. If a generic USB UPS is installed, Windows Server recognizes this as a Battery Unit. The status is…
Documenting with PowerShell Chapter 4: Network documentation for IT-Glue.
In the last couple of blogs we spoke about how to handle passwords, passwords objects and tagging, and how to start documenting your servers. Today, We’re starting on the network side of documentation. Within IT-Glue it’s important to follow the IT-Glue standards so your documentation works with the relational database it was designed on. There…
Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring Dell device updates
I’m a big fan of Dell’s Command Update utility. Dell Command update is a program that makes updating Dell based devices super easy, a single utility that you can install on any workstation to update all devices is great. We always deploy Dell Command update with any machine we hand out to clients. The next…
Documenting with PowerShell Chapter 3: Local Administrator Passwords solution
As a good administrator does we always try to change the local administrator password on computers that we hand-out to clients, and disable it, so we only have to enable it when it’s required. Unfortunately changing it is sometimes forgotten during any process. Microsoft makes this easy when implementing LAPS. LAPS is a solution by…
Monitoring with PowerShell: SMART status via CrystalDiskInfo
In a peer-group that I am a member of recently we’ve had a small discussion about monitoring the SMART status of hard drives. We all agreed that the issue with SMART monitoring is that often it is unreliable when using RMM systems. This is due to RMM systems using only the Windows SMART output which…
Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring log on of specific users.
Hi Guys, This’ll be the last blog before I go on holidays, So enjoy it and see you all in two weeks. This time we’re going to talk about montoring the logon of specific users. We use named accounts for all our engineers and want to alert if another account that is unnamed has been…
Documenting with PowerShell: Chapter 2 – Documenting Bitlocker keys
Our RMM system currently does not have support to securely store the bitlocker key inside of the RMM system itself. I’ve subscribed to the school of bitlocking everything that passes through my company, So also computers that sometimes never get connected to Azure AD, Active Directory to store the key in. We also get users…
IT-Glue unofficial backup script.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been focused on some API efforts for IT-Glue and was asked by a couple of partners if I couldn’t solve the problem that IT-Glue does not have a backup feature available. This makes it difficult to move away from the product, but also access you data in case of…