We were introduced with a rather strange issue where a website using an internal URL with an SSL certificate was deemed invalid by Google Chrome for about 30% of the company. Both the website and root certificates are not expired and available through the Windows Certificate Store. Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Internet Explorer (I know,…
Pester 5 Configuration settings
Since Pester v5 was released this legacy warning appears every time a Pester test is performed with the -CodeCoverage flag being used. WARNING: You are using Legacy parameter set that adapts Pester 5 syntax to Pester 4 syntax. This parameter set is deprecated, and does not work 100%. The -Strict and -PesterOption parameters are ignored,…
ForEach versus ForEach-Object
The ForEach-Object cmdlet performs an operation on each item in an array of input objects. There are two methods to implement the ForEach command; 1. $Range | ForEach-Object {}2. ForEach ($Number in $Range) {} Both methods perform the same actions with the same outcome, but they do their job in a different way. In this…
Run Python (Django) websites in IIS
I got into a scenario where it was required to run a Python (Django) website in IIS and, as an additional requirement, the configuration needed to be fully automated. I made a little index with all the steps that I took to make the scenario happen. Install Python Install Microsoft IIS with required extra features…
Disable and remove inactive accounts in Active Directory
Quite a few companies don’t have proper account management software to maintain their users in Active Directory . Accounts that remain active while the employees already left the company can be a security risk. This little script will disable and remove inactive accounts. The script performs the following actions:– Disable accounts that have not been…
Removing large folders in Windows
Removing folders with a large quantity of files can take up quite some time. Windows explorer first calculates the the removal time by counting the files and sizes before the removal process eventually starts.There are faster ways to remove these large folder by batch and PowerShell. Both don’t do any form of calculation, but begin…
Nexus Repository Manager 3 unattended configuration with API and PowerShell
Nexus Repository Manager 3 is a tool to create private repositories for Maven, NuGet, Python, Docker and several other package systems. I was requested to automate the installation. The first of the requirements was that it would run on a Windows Server OS. The second one was that two repositories had to be created. One…
Use the Active Directory PowerShell module without installing RSAT
During the creation of a new custom Azure Devops extension for one of my customers, I bumped into the challenge of querying Active Directory. This had to be done on any of the many build servers, but installing Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) on every build server was not an option. Therefore the AD PowerShell…
Connect Azure Devops to SonarQube with self-signed certificates
When you are running SonarQube on-premise, it is most likely that you want to use a self-signed certificate to keep the tool secured. Unfortunately, SonarQube is a Java based application, so getting it up and running is not as straight-forward as expected. In my case, after configuring SQ for HTTPS, the SonarQube extension for Azure…
Clean JSON output for ConvertTo-Json
PowerShell 5.1 has nice cmdlet called ConvertTo-Json that converts objects to JSON syntax. Unfortunately, this conversion isn’t very clean. It contains tons of extra white space and querying JSON is not possible for most of the tools including PowerShell. PowerShell-Core 7 received a major update on cmdlet. It actually converts objects into clean JSON code.…