#tomsitpro

Working With Regular Expressions In Powershell

Matching strings is a common occurrence when writing PowerShell scripts. No matter how many things in PowerShell are objects with lots of useful properties, there always comes a time when you’ve got a string that isn’t quite right. Whether you need to check to see if a string contains certain characters or you need to pull out some information, a regular expression (regex) is a powerful way to…

Use Powershell To Make WSUS Suck Less

Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) has been around for a long time and has provided IT professionals a free tool to manage Windows and some third party updates across all of their Windows systems. It eases the task of inventorying, installing and maintaining patches across Windows. WSUS relies on a server and a policy on each computer it’s managing. Managing WSUS typically consists of working…

Getting Started With Windows Containers

Containers are not for Tupperware parties anymore; they are part of the IT world. Although Containers are not entirely mainstream yet, such companies as Docker have removed the traditional management burden that came with this technology. A small footprint, lightning fast speed and portability make them increasingly popular. But what are containers anyway? Containers are essentially operating…

Getting Started With Ansible On Windows

One of the most popular configuration management and infrastructure automation products on the market is Ansible. Ansible — along with Chef, Puppet, CFEngine — is part of a class of software for DevOps. These tools help automate infrastructure provisioning, software deployments and general configuration management. Ansible is focused on Linux. However, with Microsoft’s new stance on open source,…

How To Setup Linux To Query Windows WinRM Hosts

To run commands on Windows computers from a Linux host requires a few more steps than just enabling it. PowerShell remoting now provides the ability to remotely execute commands on computers just like being on the remote machine’s console. It provides seamless integration with Active Directory and is simple to setup but only if in a Windows environment. Because the technology and tooling around…

Snowball Edge: Who Needs It And Why

Snowball Edge is Amazon’s answer to customers’ complaints about the lack of support for on-premise data management use cases where the cloud networks are limited by the data bandwidth and geography. Snowball Edge is an update to the popular Snowball storage container program. It’s Amazon’s answer to customers’ complaints about the lack of support for on-premise data management use cases wherein…