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How to sign a PowerShell script

As a DevOps engineer, I frequently come across talented developers that underestimate some security aspects of the deployments, for instance, just to name a couple:  integrity and authenticity of the code or artefacts that we deploy.

Python and Powershell are powerful languages to develop quick and robust solutions are extremely popular between attackers, for this reason, our ecosystem should take security very seriously.

Security is now far beyond the (old) perimeter of the company’s’ premises and infrastructure, indeed network or systems is abstracted away with or without cloud/hybrid deployments and just the enforcing identity is not enough in most cases.

In my opinion, white-listing applications around code-signing and checking the integrity of our code it’s more effective and less painful than you can think a good habit to build on a daily basis.

Continue reading “How to sign a PowerShell script”

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Application Deployment Troubleshooting with Powershell

As a DevOps, most of my energies are constantly focused on doing or fixing things right from the start with the intention of creating a simple or at least straightforward processes.  But this is not an article on my endless war against technical debt and avoiding shortcuts whenever it’s possible.

the more things change, the more they stay the same

The values and the culture inherited from ITIL, Agile and DevOps massively influenced the whole modern software life cycle.  CI/CD extended to code quality/testing/delivery etc.. In these years should have changed most of our daily tasks or our business-as-usual, right? Well… not yet! Continue reading “Application Deployment Troubleshooting with Powershell”

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How to generate a Remote Desktop Manager (RDMan) group XML for your infrastructure with PowerShell

I thought that RDMan, aka Remote Desktop Connection Manager, fitted perfectly in “A BLAST FROM THE PAST” category of software used back in the day by every System Engineer working on Windows Systems. I was wrong. Believe it or not, it is still strong today!

When you need to manage multiple servers/workstation remotely via RDP(Remote Desktop Protocol) it’s for most professionals the obvious choice. The GUI of the application is straightforward and in most cases or scenarios it’s fit for purpose. Continue reading “How to generate a Remote Desktop Manager (RDMan) group XML for your infrastructure with PowerShell”

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How to trigger incoming webhooks in Microsoft Teams with Powershell

As a DevOps with work experiences as a Developer and System Engineer, I tend to give for granted that all my colleagues or peers have the same background knowledge or simply the same vocabulary.

But I’ve recently discussed with some seasoned sysadmins working for other companies and I was surprised to discover the barrier was around the vocabulary and the design principles (for developers or system engineers) used as a reference point.

Naturally, we try to solve problems with solutions or technologies that we already used in the past, without exploring all the possibilities. Sometimes we simply don’t get some context or benefits of doing it differently or we can’t measure how expensive can be the adoption of different models or strategies.

For instance: Microservices, RESTfulAPI, Webhooks are common terms that most of us are comfortable using every day, but these design implementations and functions are sometimes not so simple to break it down into small independent pieces. Continue reading “How to trigger incoming webhooks in Microsoft Teams with Powershell”

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How to Query and Log Off Remote Desktop Sessions with Powershell

The Remote Desktop Procotol (RDP) is still strong and it’s not going away anytime soon, indeed there are companies like CITRIX that have built part of their success creating robust management for it.
As you can Imagine, there a lot of ways to manage RDP according to the type of implementations or tools involved, so some corner cases will not be cover in this article. There are also tools like gateways that will provide a central management point for all sessions, but let’s assume that these tools are not available to you or not part your infrastructure design. Continue reading “How to Query and Log Off Remote Desktop Sessions with Powershell”