Category: Powershell

Anthony Nocentino has a quick Powershell script to see if ports are open on a machine:

Ever want to confirm that a port is accessible from one computer to another? There’s a PowerShell cmdlet for that, Test-NetConnection. With the -Port option, this cmdlet will do a quick TCP three-way handshake on the remote system to confirm that the service is available and reports back if it succeeded or not. Check out that last line of output TcpTestSucceeded: False. That indicates that this port is not accessible. You can see, however, that the system is reachable via ICMP (Ping), PingSuceeded: True so we know that the remote system is alive, just not listening on the port we want to access.

For when your security team won’t let you install nmap.

Max Trinidad has built a function to remove older versions of the Azure module:

As you probably know by now, “Azure RM” modules has been renamed to “Az” Module. Microsoft want you to start using this module moving forward. Currently, this new release is on version 0.5.0, and you’ll need to remove the any previous module(s) installed. Information about Azure PowerShell can be found on the following link.

Now, there’s always been a tedious task when manually removing module dependencies, and there’s no exception with the “Az” module.  So, we can all take advantage to PowerShell and create a script to work around this limitation.

And, below is a few options.

Max also provides us a couple of other options as well.

Richard Siddaway on approved verbs in Powershell:

The other very useful set information are the synonyms for verbs that you shouldn’t use. For instance don’t use Append, Attach, Concatenate or Insert – use Add. Some of this information is contextual though as you shouldn’t use Pop or Out as a synonym for Exit BUT Pop is perfectly valid when removing an item off a stack (Pop-Location is the only cmdlet I know of that works in that way).

Read on for a link to the approved verbs list.

Kevin Marquette has a tour de force on Powershell arrays:

When your array is a collection of string or integers (value types), sometimes you will want to update the values in the array as you enumerate them. Most of the iteration loops above use a variable in the loop that holds the value. If you update that variable, the original value in the array is not updated.

The exception to that statement is the for loop. If you are wanting to walk an array and update values inside it, then the for loop is what you are looking for.

    for ( $index = 0; $index -lt $data.count; $index++ )
    {
        $data[$index] = "Item: [{0}]" -f $data[$index]
    }

This examples takes a value by index, makes a few changes, and then uses that same index to assign it back.

This is a book chapter-length blog post full of good information.