jonoble.com blog

2013 PowerShell Scripting Games

2013-04-22T09:00:31Z

If you've read very much of my blog, you'll know that I'm a big fan of the annual Scripting Games, where challenges are set for beginners and advanced scripters, to be solved in PowerShell. The reason I like this event so much, apart from enjoying a challenge, is that it's an excellent way to learn, regardless of your level of proficiency.

The great thing about the Scripting Games is that you can have a go at solving each problem and then see an expert solution to compare your efforts with. Even if you're really competing at the advanced level, you're likely to learn something from that, and if you're just a beginner, then there's no better way to learn that to try to solve a problem and being shown by an expert the best way to do it.

The 2013 event kicks off today, and I strongly recommend you take part if you have the time. If you don't have time to do it right now, then there's nothing stopping you having a go after the competition has ended - just make sure that you give the challenges a try before you look at the expert solutions.

More System Center 2012 SP1 on Microsoft Virtual Academy

2013-03-28T17:38:54Z

Earlier this month, I pointed at a couple of courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy - which is a great free resource, if you haven't already found it. I've since found a post on the System Center blog pointing at a whole load more content that you might want to check out:

Configuring and deploying Microsoft's Private Cloud	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/configuring-and-deploying-microsoft-s-private-cloud
Introduction to the Microsoft Private Cloud	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/introduction-to-the-microsoft-private-cloud
Introduction to Hyper-V Jump Start (with System Center 2012 SP1)	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/introduction-to-hyper-v-jump-start
Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals Jump Start (with System Center 2012 SP1)	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/microsoft-virtualization-for-vmware-professionals-jump-start
Microsoft Solution Accelerators for the Datacenter and Private Cloud	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/microsoft-solution-accelerators-for-the-datacenter-and-private-cloud
Private Cloud: Computing and Infrastructure Management	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/private-cloud-computing-and-infrastructure-management
Private Cloud: Service Delivery and Automation	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/private-cloud-training-service-delivery-and-automation
Private Cloud: Application Services Management	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/private-cloud-application-services-management
Private Cloud: Infrastructure Components	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/private-cloud-infrastructure-components
System Center 2012 Licensing Overview	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-2012-licensing-overview
System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Updates	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-2012-service-pack-1-updates
System Center 2012 SP1 Capabilities	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-2012-sp1-capabilities
System Center 2012: Operations Manager	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-2012-training-operations-manager
System Center 2012: Configuration Manager	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/overview-and-infrastructure-changes-in-sccm-2012
System Center 2012: Data Protection Manager	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/protecting-private-clouds-with-system-center-2012-dpm
System Center 2012: Orchestrator & Service Manager	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-2012-orchestrator-service-manager
System Center 2012: Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-2012-virtual-machine-manager-vmm-
System Center Advisor	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/system-center-advisor
What’s New in System Center 2012	http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/what-s-new-in-system-center-2012

That's a whole lot of learning, but that's going to be of limited use to you if you don't then go and kick the tires. To that end you might want to setup a test lab. You can download an evaluation of Windows Server 2012, either as an ISO if you want to pop it on a spare bit of kit, or a ready to use VHD file that you can attach to a VM, or boot from on your desktop. Then you can install an evaluation of System Center 2012 with SP1.

If you like, you can even setup an IaaS pop-up lab on Windows Azure and it doesn't have to cost you a penny:

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

2013-03-27T13:01:31Z

Last weekend, James and I set out on a mission to build a replica of Hogwarts. We knew it was going to be a big job, so we wasted no time, starting at 08:30, still in pyjamas.

Although we've watched the Harry Potter films a number of times, been to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and to WB Studio Tour London, we can't actually remember exactly what Hogwarts looks like, so we started with a photo:

Then we decided which elements we wanted to have in our model:

Next step was to lay out our pieces roughly to see whether we had enough raw material to do what we'd planned. Lesley had been collecting cardboard boxes and tubes for a few weeks and it turned out that we had almost exactly the right amount, although we were required to devour a Flake Easter Egg early in order to use its box - sometimes you have to suffer for your art (at least I think that's how it went down - it may be that we were just desperate for a bit of chocolate one evening - you know how it is!).

Having decided that we had plenty boxes, we added more detail...

Once we'd got the boxes and tubes in place, we made some paper cones to top the turrets, added some height to our large Bisto turret, some card prisms to the top of our Bran Flakes towers...

...and a facade on the grrreat big building at the back...

Then it was time to paint.

We had to go out and buy paint, which meant we had to disrupt our flow to get washed and dressed first, then headed to B&Q where they have Dulux testers on a 3 for £1 deal. They didn't have exactly the shades for brick and slate that we were after, so we picked up 6 pots and mixed them together to give a nice red brick and slate roof.

We made sure that we also got plenty paint on socks...

...and hands...

Then we took our newly painted building bits...

...and re-assembled them into Hogwarts...

This model is only designed to be viewed from the front, so we didn't bother to paint the back. You might notice the large turret (beside the Flake Easter Egg) having a bit of a bashed roof. That was something to do with a water pistol launching off the windowsill right on to the point of that cone. No idea how it happened, but I'm pretty certain it defied the laws of physics.

The next step was to draw on some detail. Some windows, detailing in the brickwork, and some numbers, because why not?? Then we taped the bits together into two easily transportable halves.

The whole point of this was to enter an Easter Egg competition at James' nursery school, so we needed to add our Harry Potter egg (created by Lesley), wearing a black wizard's cloak and riding a broom stick (paintbrush)...

In the end, James didn't win the competition (we probably gave him just a little bit too much help), but we certainly had a lot of fun building Hogwarts! :-)

p.s. If you like this, you might also want to have a look at Alice Finch builds massive LEGO Hogwarts from 400,000 bricks - very cool.

Deleting AD Users with PowerShell - Why is a user not a leaf object?

2013-03-22T16:17:33Z

I've been re-writing some automated processes around user account lifecycle recently, making use of the Active Directory PowerShell module on Windows Server 2012. Most recently this involved removing a large number of expired user accounts. On the first attempt of trying to remove the user objects I was receiving this error for a number of them, seemingly at random:

Remove-ADObject : The directory service can perform the requested operation only on a leaf object

So why would a user object in AD not be a leaf object? It turns out that when a user connects a device to Exchange with EAS, there's an AD object created for that device inside the user object and that is what is stopping the user being a leaf object.

You might search for this and find advice on using Remove-ActiveSyncDevice before you remove the user. The trouble with that is that if you've got multiple versions of Exchange running in your org, then you might find that you can't remove the ActiveSyncDevice for all your users with the same method.

It doesn't matter anyway because the point is that the user isn't a leaf; it's a container that now has child objects, so what do you need to do to delete a container? Simply do a recursive remove. In the case of what I've been doing, this does the job:

$30daysago = (get-date).AddDays(-30)
Get-ADUser -filter {accountexpirationdate -lt $30daysago} | Remove-ADObject -Recursive

R.I.P. Google Reader

2013-03-14T09:28:58Z

I read a lot of stuff on the web. It's how I try to keep as up to date as possible with my professional and personal interests, especially around technology. Yes, Twitter helps with that too, but it's all too easy to miss something on Twitter when you follow a lot of people (I rely on saved searches a lot). By far the easiest way for me to keep on top of a large amount of content is to subscribe to RSS feeds in Google Reader.

When I'm at my desk, if I don't have the Google Reader site open all day, I'll at least check it 2 or 3 times. When I wake up in the morning, I'll check my GR feeds via a 3rd party app on my phone. In the evening, I'll sometimes keep track of new news via another 3rd party app on my tablet. In other words, I use Google Reader all the freaking time.

Today, my stats in Google Reader tell me this:

From your 394 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,517 items, clicked 176 items, starred 2 items, and emailed 0 items.

Since October 25, 2006 you have read a total of 285,200 items.

Now Google has announced that they're going to shut down Reader on 1st July 2013. Personally I think they tried to bury the lead by putting the closure of Reader as the 5th item in a list of 8, and by posting it just after the election of a new Pope.

I had a conversation earlier today about the value of Reader to Google, and there was a suggestion that seeing people's reading habits holding value when you mine the data (as Google does across all its properties). My stance on that is that they've probably got the demographic data pretty well locked down for the sort of people who use Reader - it's a minority anyway and likely fairly easy to pigeon-hole - so returns on that are probably diminishing. Regardless of that, it's a bad idea for them to annoy that demographic, which will contain a lot of early adopters and influencers in the tech industry.

Personally, I'm boycotting Chrome right now (although that probably won't last), and I was considering making a purchase of a new Android device, which I'm now going to give some more thinking time. Neither of those things will probably bother Google, but it's making me feel a bit better today because I'm pissed off.

I'm sure that by the 1st July there will be a viable alternative. None of the other options today have the ecosystem that Reader has. I expect that there may even be something better - it's been a while since Google have actively developed Reader and there are some areas where it's holding back the clients from developing new, innovative features. I'm not even sure that the transition will be that painful, it's just annoying that something that's so widely used and appreciated is going away while other, less used Google products are continuing on.

I am going to stop short of blaming the new Pope for this, but I think that Hitler sums up the situation quite well in this instance:

Frustration with the Lync 2013 client for Windows Phone 8

2013-03-11T09:42:12Z

Microsoft have released the Lync 2013 client for Windows Phone 8, and it looks great - many more features than the 2010 version, including voice and video calling. However, when I try to login to my account on Office 365 it tells me that "You can't sign in with this version of Lync. Please install Lync 2010."

That's unfortunate and somewhat unexpected, partly because I'm happily using the Lync 2013 desktop client on my Windows 8 desktop, but more so because the app description in the Windows Phone Store gives no real indication that it wouldn't work. What it does say, in all caps, is this:

IMPORTANT: THIS SOFTWARE REQUIRES CONNECTIVITY TO VALIDLY LICENSED COPIES OF MICROSOFT LYNC SERVER OR OFFICE 365 / LYNC ONLINE AND WILL NOT WORK WITHOUT IT. UPDATES TO MICROSOFT LYNC SERVER MAY BE REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE. SOME FUNCTIONALITY MAY NOT BE AVAILABLE IN ALL COUNTRIES. IF YOU ARE UNSURE ABOUT YOUR COMPANY’S LICENSE TO AND/OR DEPLOYMENT OF LYNC, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT.

That's the only information about requirements for using the app, and you'll notice that it explicitly says that you can use it with Office 365. It's not a case of "some functionality may not be available in all countries" - this client uses something called UCX which isn't supported by Lync 2010 servers, so evidentially we'll have to wait for Microsoft to upgrade our O365 tennancy. I'd be fine with that if the above important information didn't say "UPDATES TO MICROSOFT LYNC SERVER MAY BE REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE." I'd say that "proper performance" implies that some features may not work optimally, not that you won't be able to get so far as signing in!

I'm sure that the people who have Lync 2013 and Windows Phone 8 devices are going to be very happy with this app, and I expect that I may be happy with it in the future* but this is just another example of Microsoft giving mixed/misleading messages around Windows Phone 8 and it isn't good enough! (For the other prime example that annoys me even more, I refer you to the podcast user experience outside the USA. Going into the Podcasts section of the Music + Videos hub tells you that "It's lonely in here. Go to the Store to add some podcasts", but there aren't any unless you're in the USA. This is something that's built in to the core OS and only works in one country of all the teritories where Windows Phones are sold. Shocking.)

On a positive note, as one of my colleagues pointed out, at least the error message in this case is vaguely helpful and doesn't just give you some obscure error code.

UPDATE: I personally have two totally unrelated Office 365 accounts. Lync 2013 for Windows Phone 8 works with one but not the other. YMMV.

UPDATE2: This is also an issue with the Lync 2013 clients that have just been released for iOS. The Lync 2013 for iPhone and Lync 2013 for iPad descriptions both lack the crucial bit of information that the back end server needs to be running Lync 2013 CU1 (which was only released last month - I wonder how many organizations are ready for these great new mobile clients?).

* If I don't switch back to Android first.

Bletchley Park

2013-03-08T14:22:51Z

Back in November I had the privilege to spend two days at Bletchley Park, the home of the legendary WWII code breakers and the National Museum of Computing, along with a number of the UK-based Microsoft MVPs. It's a place that I've personally wanted to visit for a number of years because my grandfather's wartime role was at a Wireless Intercept 'Y Station' that was listening in on Axis communications to be decrypted by the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park (the forerunner to GCHQ).

The two days were filled with presentations from Microsoft staff and MVPs in the ballroom, a team code breaking exercise around the grounds and huts, and a tour of the Museum. The modern content in the presentations was very interesting, but it was the history on display that was the star of the show. This is where many significant developments took place in the early days of computing, as well as work that has been credited with shortening the war and contributing greatly to Allied victory. The history is alive at Bletchley Park and there was a palpable energy in Hut 8, where Alan Turing and his team worked on the German naval Enigma codes.

The after dinner speaker at the end of day 1 was the Director of the National Museum of Computing, Dr David Hartley. He gave an excellent brief history of the pioneering computing done at Bletchley and across the UK, including Tommy Flowers' work and the Harwell Dekatron (aka WITCH); the oldest working stored-program computer in the world, which was recently restored to working order.

I have to say that visiting the National Museum of Computing with a group of people who were equally interested in computing history was a real pleasure. It's quite fantastic seeing the replica Colossus and Bombe machines, and the restored Dekatron, not only in the flesh, but in action! As well as these and many other large machines on display, the museum has an excellent selection of microcomputers (including a room of BBC Model B machines that can be used), peripherals, mobiles, software, books and magazines. I found some books that I used to own and some copies of the Let's Compute magazine that I had a subscription to as a boy. If you've been around computers for a long time, then you're going to find a bunch of things that bring back memories you'd forgotten you had. It's awesome. :-)

If you're ever in the vicinity of Milton Keynes, I urge you to visit, enjoy and support this fascinating and important site. The Museum isn't fully open every day, so check the website when you plan your visit: www.tnmoc.org & www.bletchleypark.org.uk. You should take a guided tour of the museum and then browse in your own time - the staff are both knowledgeable and enthusiastic and really add to the experience.

If you're interested in finding out more about the wartime work carried out at Bletchley Park, I can highly recommend Sinclair McKay's "The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The History of the Wartime Codebreaking Centre by the Men and Women Who Were There", which is available in paperback and on Kindle. I'm currently reading the follow-up to that book on my Kindle: "The Secret Listeners: How the Wartime Y Service Intercepted the Secret German Codes for Bletchley Park"

System Center 2012 SP1

2013-03-07T09:27:26Z

When Microsoft first released Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012, there was a short period of pain when early adopters found that it was broken due to it shipping with a certificate that expired almost immediately. Thankfully that was quickly resolved and what is available now is an excellent update in terms of support for new versions of Windows and enhanced functionality.

I would recommend that people look at Microsoft Virtual Academy for details on the updates in SP1. They actually have two courses that cover it: System Center 2012 SP1 Updates and System Center 2012 SP1 Capabilities.

As usual, Microsoft has evaluation versions of the software available and you can grab System Center 2012 SP1 (handily with or without System Center 2012 in the same download bundle) from this link.

TheTekTonic Show

2013-03-05T20:30:12Z

Last Sunday there was a seismic shift when my good friend Ben Lee and I recorded the zero-th episode of our new podcast, TheTekTonic Show. The idea is that it'll be a semi-regular dose of tech chat, not covering the news as such, but more to do with trends. Since both of us are IT Pros working largely in the Microsoft stack, you can expect a bias towards discussion of Microsoft products and corporate IT, but we're generally interested in all technology, and with all the BYOD, corporate IT and consumer tech are crossing over.

Our plan is to have guests on most episodes and we're putting together a diverse list of interesting people from across the industry for future recordings. We've also got to get an mp3 version and RSS feed sorted out, but for now, here's the recording of episode 0, where we discuss Microsoft's new update strategy and Blackberry's comeback. Please comment and give feedback, and if you think you'd like to be on the show in the future, let us know.

Microsoft's Certified Career Day

2013-03-05T10:07:21Z

If you're an IT Pro and you aren't thinking about cloud technologies, then you probably aren't reading technology blogs either, so I'm assuming that you, dear reader, are conscious of the shift towards the cloud. You might also be thinking about getting skilled up and certified as a cloud expert for the benefit of your career.

On Tuesday 12th March (from 08:30 PDT), Microsoft is running a Certified Career Day to talk about the technologies, the direction and the certifications they have available. There's quite a line-up of experts on the schedule, so I expect the content is going to be pretty interesting.

The audience numbers for the free broadcast are limited, so you should sign up ASAP (and you might win an Acer tablet too). Head over to www.certifiedcareerday.com to register.

If you haven't done so already, you might want to start familiarising yourself with Windows Server 2012. It's been redesigned from the ground up with the cloud firmly in mind. There are two ways that you can do that easily. If you have a spare computer you can test on, grab the trial ISO image that will give you 180 days for evaluation, otherwise you can grab the Virtual Hard Disk and boot your PC into it without impacting your primary OS.

Downloads:

Windows Server 2012 ISO

Windows Server 2012 VHD