This is the updated version of my old LName function.

I changed the name to Get-SNames instead of Get-LNames because of
that I know that the correct name is not Last Name and It should be Surname instead.

I use It in my create AD lab script and in a couple of other scripts when I
need “real” peoples name.

My thought have been to update It so that I can use names from other countries
as well.

So I came up with an updated version of the function that can create
a list from USA and It can also create a list from Sweden, as It could
before.

The Swedish list is taken from The Gothenburg University

The US list is taken from mongabay.com’s name site

I have done some changes to the Swedish list as well.
The list is now sorted and saved as UTF-8. The UTF-8 part is for viewing and using names that contains Swedish letters å ä and ö.

The function can be downloaded from here.

No related posts.

Back in 2009 I wrote a Function that took peoples first names from a source in Sweden.
It was top 1000 names here in Sweden.

I use It in my create AD lab script and in a couple of other scripts when I need “real” peoples name.

My thought have been to update It so that I can use names from other countries as well.
So I came up with an updated version of the function that can create a list from USA and It can also create a list from Sweden, as I could before.

The names from USA comes from Social Security Online.

The Swedish names come from the Gothenburg University.

When you run the function you need to have internet access!

The function can be downloaded from here.

No related posts.

I wrote this tool for my friend DXter a year ago or so.
He did an presentation on bitlocker and wanted a tool that shows
TPM Information from inside Windows and with an GUI.

Now It’s a new year and I have been playing around with it and did some changes:

• Bugfixes
• Added my function Get-PingStatus

You need to run the script as Administrator!

You can download the tool here.

The tool is provided “as is”.

No related posts.

Over at 2009 I wrote a ping status function.
The function can now be downloaded from the Script Center Repository at Microsoft.
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Get-PingStatus-Function-e375fec3

I use It in my own scripts and just updated It so I hope others can use It too.

.EXAMPLE
    Get-PingStatus server01
.EXAMPLE
    if (Get-PingStatus server01) { Write-Host “I’m up!” }
.EXAMPLE
    if (!(Get-PingStatus server01)) { Write-Host “I’m not up!” }

No related posts.

I will blog more about Deployment and PowerShell from now on.

This is my second week at Mindgrape.

I will be working more with deployment solutions like
MDT 2010/2012, SCCM 2007/2012 and scripting with PowerShell
and Windows Servers. Plus application packaging with Wise and Admin Studio.

And I will blog at least once a week.

No related posts.

More and more people are talking about turning of the new menu in Windows 8.
The Start thing or the Metro.

Both in Windows 8 Server and the Windows 8 client.

My friend Mikael Nyström wrote how to do this with reg.exe for Windows 8 Server
on his blog.

I’m a PowerShell person and I like simple stuff so I created a PowerShell script that will put a Shortcut on the desktop after the first run of the script.

And when you click the Shortcut you are back to the new one again and
now you have a new shortcut.

I have notice that the deletion of the .lnk not shows up directly.
So you might have to hit F5 after the run of the script to see only one shortcut.

The script are made to be in c:\scripts and be named menuwin8.ps1

And you need to change the execution policy before you run the script!

Hit the downloads button for the script…

No related posts.

I saw this module earlier today and I have been looking for something
like this for a while so I have been playing around with It for for an hour or so.

You can download It here.

Install it with the msi file and then open up PowerShell ISE.
Hmmmm, not my favorite thing, but It will not work from the PowerShell prompt.

Then type

Import-Module Facebook

And to make a connection file you need to type

New-FBCconnection

And then login to Facebook

And grant the “Application” rights to your FB account.

To get a list of the commands for the FB module just type

Get-Command –module Facebook

To get the number of friends you have:

(Get-FBFriends).count

or Get-FBFriends to get a list with name of all FB Friends

I like this and I hope to get Remove-FBFriend.

I have lots of FB “Friends” that I got because of some FB Games and It’s hard to delete 600+ users manually

No related posts.

I had some problems (major ones) with my local MDT 2010 last night.

After a day with lots of scripting against MDT 2010 with PowerShell my MDT 2010 installation just gave me errors when I wanted to add a new deployment share or when I wanted to open old ones:

object reference not set to an instance of an object
Microsoft.BDD.Wizards.Controls.DeploymentPointProgress.WizardProcessing

In my workbench the Deployment Shares folder was empty, no shares there. But when I looked in the user.config file I found that DS004 was in use there.

So my solution was to delete the whole file and restart the workbench.
The file can be found here, C:\Users\currentUser\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

[Update]
DXter sent me this PowerShell oneliner after that I wrote this blog post, 

Remove-Item -Path “$ENV:USERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit\user.config”

Thanks buddy!

No related posts.

The people from PowerGUI just released a new version.
Latest new version is 3.0.0.2015 (2011-07-21).

As I often say, PowerGUI is and will always be my favorite
PowerShell Editor. And I use the free version.

For information about all new features take a look at
Kirks blog post here.

No related posts.

I have been working with Quest AD cmdlets.
Here are my stuff about It…

Get it here:
http://www.questsoftware.de/powershell/activeroles-server.aspx

Install it!

Now we need to add the snapin.
To find out the name we just write (Get-PSSnapin –Registered).name

And then we add it by writing Add-PSSnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement

To list the cmdlets we can write Get-Command *qad*

To count the cmdlets associated with Quests AD cmdlets we can write
(Get-Command *qad*).count

This means that we now have 81 new cmdlets loaded

In just a oneliner we now can get all users in the AD and export It to a csv file.

Get-QADUser -sizelimit 5000 | select SamAccountName, UserPrincipalName, Name, DN
| export-csv C:\scripts\users.txt

And now we can open the csv file in excel and see all the information.

And this in under 10 min

No related posts.