Author: Paolo Frigo

Systems Administrator and Software Engineer with 10+ years' experience in server infrastructure management, data-centre operations and development across Windows and Linux.
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Check if a mailbox exists with Python and smtplib

Every day we discover different tools that should make our life easier, enchanted by the promise of achieving the best result without any effort. If we can master that tool or technique we can solve many problems even without understanding or finding the root cause, right?

So often I’m guilty of making that assumption, because it not just lazyness it’s harder and it takes time and patience to break complicated puzzles into small simple pieces. Even more to put it all those parts back together to finally find answers to questions like: How? When? Why?

Continue reading “Check if a mailbox exists with Python and smtplib”

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TOP50 PowerShell blog of 2018

This is a brief message to thank you all for the positive feedback received.

I will do my best to write better content and choose interesting topics.

As always I’m open to suggestions and to contributions so, please, don’t hesitate to contact me. If you want to receive more updates join the newsletter or follow me on twitter.

Last but not least:

It’s my pleasure to announce that scripting library is now listed on the Top 50 PowerShell Blogs And Websites For Developers To Follow in 2018

 

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Compress a Folder With a little bit of help from .NET Framework

Few weeks ago I needed to free some space form a disk on a Windows Server 20012 R2, so I wanted to compress a large number folders, each one of them contained few hundred MB of log files.  It required to preserve the folder name and deleting or moving the files or directory from that volume/partition was not an option.

“It’s an easy task with PowerShell“, I thought, “I can re-use one of my functions or scripts“.

In fact, few months ago I’ve published an article on how to compress a folder, but to re-use that specific code on that environment I needed to install 7zip (which in this specific case I tried to avoid), because the cmd-let Compress-Archive was released with version 5 and the server is using PowerShell 4.  So I needed to revisit my script that wasn’t ready to go and solve my problem without a little tweak. Continue reading “Compress a Folder With a little bit of help from .NET Framework”