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Category: Powershell

Non-Administrative Powershell Remoting And January 2019 LCU

Published 2019-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Emin Atac tests out a security change made in the January 2019 Latest Cumulative Update for Windows:

My first concern was: if it’s a security vulnerability, what’s its CVE? The blog post answer is: CVE-2019-0543 discovered by James Forshaw of Google Project Zero

My second concern was twofold. Is the chapter about A Least Privilege Model Implementation Using Windows PowerShell published in the PowerShell Conference Book impacted by this change? Should I stop deploying Windows 10 at work because the LCU of January 2019 breaks my loopback scenario?

The answer is no and explained by the blog post Windows Security change affecting PowerShell
you would not be affected by this change, unless you explicitly set up loopback endpoints on your machine to allow non-Administrator account access

Read on for some testing and digging into what works when and why.

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Getting Reporting Services Installation Details With Powershell

Published 2019-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Josh Smith wants to find every installation of SQL Server Reporting Services on a machine:

This is one of those posts so I never have to google this again (one hopes). Here is the PS code to pull back a set of details about every SSRS instance installed on a server including the SSRS instance name, & the first URL port it is running on, the service name and the name of the report server database etc.

Click through for the Powershell script.

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Automation With Powershell Desired State Configuration

Published 2019-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret takes us on a journey to a desired state:

PowerShell DSC is a platform to support the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC).  It uses declarative syntax instead of the usual imperative syntax of PowerShell.  This means that you describe your desired state rather than the specific steps needed to get there.  There are two modes for DSC, push and pull, although pull mode offers more features and scalability, we’ll look at writing our configuration and using push mode for this blog post to keep it simple.

This post covers initial installation and some of the initial configuration, so check it out if you’re new to DSC.

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A Docker-Based Sandbox For dbatools

Published 2019-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire takes us through using Docker to build a playground for learning the functionality inside dbatools:

I’ve long wanted to do this to help dbatools users easily create a non-production environment to test commands and safely explore our toolset. I finally made it a priority because I needed to ensure some Availability Group commands I was creating worked on Docker, too, and having some clean images permanently available was required. Also, in general, Docker is a just a good thing to know for both automation and career opportunities

Probably a little bit better to work on cmdlets you don’t know about in a sandboxed container rather than on production. Just a little bit.

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Invoke-DbaDiagnosticQuery In dbatools

Published 2019-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Andre Kamman walks through a particularly useful cmdlet in the dbatools package:

My answer to that is simple, I’m a major contributor to the awesome Powershell library dbatools. What I’ve contributed to that library are commands that will help automate the running and processing of queries from the DMV library of Glenn Berry
At some point in the life of a DBA we’ve all come accross his scripts. For the longest time I would advise people to google “Glenn Berry DMV”, and it will be the top result. 
The scripts however, come in a single file per SQL Server version and you can’t run them all in one go. You would have to select a script, run it, and paste the result from Management Studio into an Excel sheet. Glenn provides an empty sheet with tabs ready to paste the various result sets in. I’ve automated this part, hope you like it!

Click through for a demonstration of this cmdlet and the useful output it generates.

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Simulating Load With Powershell

Published 2019-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey builds a quick script to simulate load using PowerShell:

The idea is to be able to easily do one of several different things. By commenting out different sections of the code, I can change the general behavior. Most of the work is done in the  # Run forever section of the code.
First, I’ll randomly pick a modulus comparison. When that hits and the remainder is 0, then I randomly wait between 3 and 13 seconds. Clearly, any of these can be adjusted.
The query gets executed. Then, I have to options for dealing with the query in cache. I can clear cache on every execution. I’ve found this very useful when dealing with bad parameter sniffing (testing or generation). Or, I can use another random set of code to occasionally remove the procedure from cache.

Click through for the script and some more notes from Grant.

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Splatting In Powershell

Published 2019-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire explains how you can simplify Powershell cmdlet calls using hashtables:

Splatting in PowerShell makes code easier to read. Instead of typing a bunch of parameters allllll across the screen, you can use an easy-to-read hashtable or array. Argument splatting was introduced in PowerShell v3 and works with all PowerShell commands, not just dbatools.
Note: I’ve only used splatting with hashtables, as they allow me to be explicit about which parameters I’m passing. It appears that arrays would employ positional parameters, which is less wordy but leaves room for error.

Whenever I hear the word “splatting” I think of the Naked Gun series of movies and OJ Simpson getting run over by a steamroller. Those were some funny movies, so that’s a good connotation.

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Data Compression With dbatools

Published 2019-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shows us the data compression options available when using dbatools:

Data compression is not a new feature in SQL Server. In fact it has been around since SQL Server 2008, so why does it matter now? Before SQL Server2016 SP1 this feature was only available in Enterprise edition. Now that it’s in Standard edition data compression can be an option for far more people.
dbatools has three functions available to help you work with data compression, and in true dbatools style it makes it easy and fast to compress your databases.

Read on for a breakdown of the Powershell cmdlets available.

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CSV Cleanup With Powershell

Published 2018-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon has a quick fix when some rows in a CSV are missing values:

I was just goofing around with the data, so I didn’t really need anything perfect…but I did want something that was good enough to be repeatable, in case I wanted to do it again.
Fixing thousands of rows by hand sounded like torture. Heck. No.
The data was from a publicly available data set, so getting the file format fixed seemed like it would probably be neither quick nor easy. Depending on others could be a dead end, and while this would be the “rightest” solution to ensure a stable future fix, it was overkill for my casual playtime.

Andy has shown the easy way. Now we lock him in a room with sed and a book on regular expressions to learn the other way. The correct answer to that, of course, is to fashion a pick kit out of the book (and whatever else you might be able to acquire) to get out.

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