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Office 365 Password Policy returns Empty Values in PowerShell

July 5, 2018 by Robert Pearman 5 Comments

Regular readers will be aware of a script I wrote some time ago to remind people to change their password, sending them an email when it was due to be changed. I wanted to extend this up to Office 365 but at the time, when I checked it out the relevant data was not exposed by using the Get-MSOLPasswordPolicy cmdlet. Or so I thought.

Whilst chatting with co-conspirator Tim Barrett yesterday he sent me a link to Spice Works where someone named bbeckers had indeed published a modified version of my original script that was talking to Office 365, and, to my surprise was dated back in 2016.

Of course I wanted to try it out, but on my production tenant, the information returned from Get-MSOLPasswordPolicy was an error saying ‘You do not have permission to call this cmdlet’

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Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with Azure AD, Office 365, Password, Power Shell, PowerShell

DHCP Option Values and PowerShell

February 16, 2017 by Robert Pearman 2 Comments

Following on from my previous post, i wanted to share a small bit of PowerShell i created whilst on a site visit.

This was before i had worked on Vendor Classes but actually follows on quite nicely. In the previous post i mentioned a requirement to set an alternate NTP Server address, and used 1.uk.pool.ntp.org.

For those who may have worked with those NTP Servers in the past you may know that (as the name suggests) they are a pool of servers and the IP address returned changes frequently. So, setting that value statically and forgetting about it led me to find a new Phone on a clients desk was not syncing the time. Read more of this post

Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with DHCP, Option Value, Power Shell

Install Windows Server Essentials with a Custom Domain Suffix

June 27, 2015 by Robert Pearman 2 Comments

After a brief argument with Susan Bradley, and i use the term brief and argument loosely, Grey Lancaster and i were left with a problem…

So can someone blog that/post that on TechNet so that folks aren’t hacking up what they are doing now?

Grey, of course, deferred to me. So here i am Saturday night and I’m writing this. I don’t mind of course because i have nothing better to do, but i digress.

Yes, you can install Essentials 2012 R2 (and probably other versions) with any domain suffix, not just the “.local” that the Essentials Configuration Wizard (ECW) will default to..

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Filed under Essentials, General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with Domain Name, Essentials 2012 R2, Essentials Experience, Power Shell

Windows Server Essentials – Configuration Troubleshooter

February 14, 2014 by Robert Pearman 225 Comments

I had a support case this week where it became apparent to me that there is no quick and easy way to test Essentials Servers for Configuration errors. Manually working through IIS or Certificates is prone to human error, as was proved to me, by me missing certain key things.

Uncharacteristically i decided to write a PowerShell script to save me from this sort of embarrassment in the future, and make me look really good next time i need to troubleshoot an Essentials Server.

You can download the tool from here, and am very interested to hear how it works for you.

If you have already downloaded it, i have updated the tool so you should download it again!

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Filed under Essentials, PowerShell, SBS E, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with Essentials, Essentials Experience, IIS, Power Shell

PowerShell, Make it do something useful!

October 29, 2012 by Robert Pearman 10 Comments

$users = ((Get-ADUser -filter * | where-object { $_.GivenName -ne $null }) | foreach{ $_.Name})
foreach ($user in $users)
{
        $FirstName = (Get-ADUser -filter {Name -eq $User} | foreach {$_.GivenName}).ToString()
        $SurName = (Get-ADUser -filter {Name -eq $User} | foreach {$_.SurName}).ToString()
        $DisplayName = ("$Firstname" + " " + "$Surname")
        $DisplayName
        Set-ADUser $User -DisplayName $DisplayName
        Set-ADUser $User -Description "User Created by Windows Server 2012 Essentials Dashboard"
}

You might be wondering what the hell that means?

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Filed under Essentials, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with Dashboard, Essentials, Power Shell

SBS 2011 Standard: Add a PSConfig Email Alert

February 27, 2012 by Robert Pearman Leave a comment

A client called me today to say ‘we cant get on the internet’, I asked what happened when they loaded up the browser, and they got a 503 Service Unavailable.