Scripting Library, Information Technology

November 2, 2018November 5, 2018

Powershell: Monitoring AD Account Lock-Out Events

One of the most basic and repetitive tasks for system administrators is certainly unlocking Active Directory user accounts. It’s very easy to underestimate it, in fact, this operation isn’t perceived not just by users, but more importantly by junior engineers not important at all! Frequently providing some general feedback to the user on this issue or simply a response that this issue is now it’s been fixed.
On top of that, I’ve found that in some situation finding the root cause it requires a bit of investigation and experience not just to guess what more likely is causing it and not many of us are willing to take this effort. But I like to explain and document what happened to the user, to me it’s absolutely key to raise the awareness and trust people and processes involved in the IT System. Continue reading “Powershell: Monitoring AD Account Lock-Out Events”

October 23, 2018November 4, 2018

Powershell: How to perform Ping Sweep and Reverse-Lookup on a private network

There is no such thing as the myth of a “perfect” green-field deployment. But in real life most of the times there is a just room/resources (e.g. time and money) for patches of green on a big brown-field.

What I really mean.. is that we can’t always keep up with the pace of new technologies and just re-design things from ground up following new trends without understanding or maintaining the legacy design or more importantly meeting the business needs.

Starting from the network and I like to create a basic network diagram will outline at glance things that could potentially limit infrastructure growth or expose it to potential risk that we need to mitigate. Designing , re-designing things well or better is based on getting the requirements right and verify that desired targets are met. To speed up this discovery process we use tools to gather the information we need. Continue reading “Powershell: How to perform Ping Sweep and Reverse-Lookup on a private network”

October 10, 2018October 20, 2018

Windows Subsystem for Linux

After a couple of months of being GA (Generally Available) I was in the WSL bandwagon.

I started using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for a lot of good reasons, especially in my role as System Engineer. I work on different environments and across various operating systems and in my world virtualization and containers are the rule. My tools of trade are Powershell, BaSH and Python on the so having all of them in the same Operating System is really handy.

I attended Meetup events where WSL was presented, I’ve presented a brownbag myself on WSL, and recently as Techsnips Contributor I’ve create a small video on how to install it. So I’ll try in this article to give you a brief introduction.

Continue reading “Windows Subsystem for Linux”