I have zero patience or compassion for people who spend their time scamming others. I usually ignore the multiple scam attempts that find their way to my inbox (or more usually spam folder), but I wanted to highlight this one to show just how inept it often is, and just how many red flags it has:
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PowerShell: Finding host name from IP address
In tech support, resolving IP addresses to host names can be something you do on a relatively frequent basis. While I’ve always used the CLI
(more…)pingcommand with the-aoption, I have also been working towards higher proficiency in PowerShell. Frankly, for a single IP address, I prefer sticking with CLI. When working with a number of addresses, however, it gets a lot more interesting. -
The trifecta of recruitment hucksters
Posting about recruitment hucksters doing recruitment has a number of purposes. First and foremost, I believe raising awareness about these things is important, and this is a good way to do so. Secondly, I think it’s also important to showcase how I evaluate (and how I’d suggest others evaluate) recruiting overtures. Thirdly, it’s proven to be an effective way to keep them quiet for a little while.
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Anatomy of an apology
We are human, and we will make mistakes. We can hope that they don’t have disastrous consequences, but sooner or later mistakes will be made. There’s just no way around it. Sometimes we’re unlucky, sometimes we’re lazy, and sometimes we’re simply negligent. Whatever the case might be, the end result is the same; a mistake has been made. That, however, is only part of the picture.
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Favorite things in 2022
As has become my habit over the past few years, I’m once more looking back at the year that has past, and the things that have made that year. Your mileage may vary, but these have all become very useful to me.
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2022 roundup
It is the end of the year, and I am once again writing my end of the year post, and what a year it has been. This time last year, the biggest of my worries was electricity prices (which are still bad, though nowhere near as bad as last year). Since then, my entire family has had Covid, Russia has invaded Ukraine (and, for the most part, been soundly beaten back), and I’ve successfully reorganized my union local.
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PowerShell: Default properties
Last week, when describing how to return specific properties, I mentioned that the command returns some standard properties, which is why I didn’t have to specify that it should get the Displayname for the members of the group. What properties are by default returned for the commonly used commands?
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PowerShell: Return multiple specific properties
The script I described a few weeks ago for finding all members of several groups is serving me very well indeed. I was recently asked to provide both the display name and the login name for each member in the group. This was readily achieved by modifying the script slightly. The rest of the script remains the same, so I will leave that well enough alone, and start with the following snippet:
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PowerShell: “Some or all identity references could not be translated”
For a whole host of reasons we use scripts to create access controlled file shares, and to create the Active Directory groups that control access to them. Not only is it easier than doing it manually, it also ensures that the group is created in the correct place, that permissions are set correctly, and that it follows our naming convention. It helps prevent errors and improve the quality of our work, as well as allowing us to push the task right out to our tier one techs, as I described when discussing the ticket cost funnel a while back.
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Notepad++: the Macro recorder
In my last post, I detailed how I solved the challenge of finding all the group members of a set of groups containing more than five hundred groups. While the Powershell script was very effective, I needed one more tool in order to really make quick work of it all; Notepad++.
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Facebook: Exporting your data
Last week, I wrote about Twitter, that I’ve stopped posting there, and how I went about exporting my posting history. I actually made a similar decision with regards to Facebook back in the end of June. Like I did with Twitter, I also grabbed a copy of my data on Facebook – here’s how:
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