PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
Validate PowerShell DSC Node Status
This is part of a blog series first referenced here: Validate the new features of PowerShell DSC New Capability A new cmdlet is available named Get-DscConfigurationStatus. This cmdlet returns detailed information about the status of a node. What is the purpose of this feature? Customers have told us that they need to be able to get more information about the state of a machine that is managed using DSC. In response, we have introduced a new cmdlet that is meant to begin addressing the issue. What is the easiest way to test it? You can run just the cmdlet with no special settings for basic information, o...
Validate PowerShell DSC RunAsCredential
This is the first part of a blog series originally referenced here. - Validate the new features of PowerShell DSC New Capability A new property, PSDSCRunAsCredential, is now available to specify a user credential that should be used to execute all work performed by a DSC resource. This capability is being introduced as a common property that can be used even for existing resources. What is the purpose of this feature? PowerShell DSC by default executes in the context of the machine System account, LocalSystem. That works well for the most part but there are cases where execution needs to occu...
Validate features of PowerShell DSC
As many readers of the PowerShell blog already know, the next version of PowerShell is currently in preview. It is available in the Windows Management Framework 5 Preview. You can install this package on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, or later. Your feedback is important to us! After software ships, it is harder to introduce changes. There is a risk that any change could break something for customers who are using the current codebase. If you can get feedback while in preview it is usually easier to make changes. For this reason we are asking anyone who can take a moment to validate new features and functionality, ...
Use DSC to manage WMI namespace security
Almost 6 years ago, I wrote some PowerShell scripts in a multi-part series explaining WMI namespace security and also how to manage them using PowerShell. If you're not familiar with WMI namespace security, I recommend reading the blog posts above or even as a refresher. I received some feedback fairly recently about some issues and this presented itself as an opportunity for me to revisit this topic, but rewrite it as a DSC resource using the new PowerShell Classes syntax. Since I'm using PowerShell classes, you'll need either Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 Preview, or Windows Management Framework 5.0 install...
DSC Resource Kit flourishes as open source
We are excited to announce the recent updates which were made to DSC Resource Kit since open sourcing it on GitHub! We were working hard on improving coverage and robustness of DSC as well as saw incredible engagement from the community in the recent months. That effort resulted in adding 32 new DSC resources across 8 modules and fixing bugs in 22 resources across 17 modules since last release at the beginning of May! It means that we’ve achieved our next milestone of 200 resources and are now up to a total of 212 DSC resources! For those who love numbers as much as we do, here’s couple other statist...
Want to write a DSC resource where only a single instance can be configured?
I've heard from a few DSC resource authors that they need a method to implement a resource that has a single instance; a singleton. The problem they encountered is a DSC resource must define a Key property but singleton resources generally should not have a key because there is only one instance that can be updated. The problem can been seen by examining the xTimeZone and xRemoteDesktopAdmin resources. xTimeZone configures the system's current time zone and uses the time zone as the key. The problem is this would let you specify the time zone multiple times during your configuration even though there is on...
Azure DSC Extension v2.0 released
NOTE: For information on OS support, and other features, please refer to our release history. Today we are releasing version 2.0 of the Azure DSC Extension, with improvements for DSC configurations that reboot the VM, and fixes for ARM deployments. We are releasing this version as a major version change, instead of a minor revision, because you may need to modify your DSC configuration in order to use this release. The changes in this release might affect you if Otherwise, the Extension should have the same behavior as in previous versions and you should have no problem continuing to use the same DSC config...
PowerShell ♥ the Blue Team
(Warning: Long blog post ahead! If you’d like to read (or share) this as a whitepaper, you can download it here: “Scripting Security and Protection Advances in Windows 10”). At Microsoft, we invest an enormous amount of time and energy managing world-class cloud services and incredibly large enterprise networks. Security is critical for all of these – so what might surprise you is that we also invest enormous amounts of time and energy trying to break into those services. This is called Red Teaming – taking highly specialized groups of security experts and having them adopt the role of sophisticated adversaries...
Looking Forward: Microsoft Support for Secure Shell (SSH)
[UPDATE]: Read more about our detailed plans, roadmap, and where you can play with the in-progress code here. As Microsoft has shifted towards a more customer-oriented culture, Microsoft engineers are using social networks, tech communities and direct customer feedback as an integral part on how we make decisions about future investments. A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. ...