kmsigma

[kmsigma]

PowerShell Modules can be Painful

Preamble Building a PowerShell module should not be too hard. In fact, on the surface it’s pretty simple. Collect a bunch of functions, classes, enumerations, (whatever else you want), bundle them together and provide a wrapper in the form of a PSD1/PSM file. My go-to reading and guidance material for this is PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches. Building a module should be straightforward…

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Beginning My First PowerShell Module

If this is the first post you land on within my site, then you probably don’t really know the passion I have for working with PowerShell. I won’t wax philosophical about it, nor will I give you a life story before getting to the recipe (I am not a food blogger), but I’ll try to do my best to explain the way I went about getting started on this, my first attempt, of a PowerShell module. First and…

[kmsigma]

PowerShell & TheTvDB API

PowerShell & TheTvDB API

For a while now I’ve been ripping my old DVD’s and Blu-rays to hard drive storage. In my entire home I have a total of 3 drives that can read discs and two of them are in video game consoles, so it’s not really easy to pull my Futurama season 4 discs out, find episode seven, and get to crying quickly. It’s easier to just search on a computer for “Jurassic Bark” and get my tears started quickly.

[kmsigma]

A Time for Reflections & Thanks

A Time for Reflections & Thanks

Seventeen years.  It’s been seventeen years since we lost my brother.  He was just 21 years old and my life has never been the same since.  Reflecting back on the intervening years, I realized that his way may have been the best way.

Thanksgiving was just four days away that year and it was particularly grim.  The dinner was still there, the parade was still on the television, the desserts were…

[kmsigma]

A Reflection on Stan Lee

A Reflection on Stan Lee

As I write this, I’m currently in the hotel room preparing for a SolarWinds User Group in Frankfurt, Germany.  I heard the news about Stan Lee’s passing at the dinner table surrounded by coworkers and friends when in London and got to thinking about how a single person can have such a large impact.  I think that we all would like to feel like we can have a similar impact. (more…)

[kmsigma]

Chicago SWUG Presentations

Protected: Chicago SWUG Presentations

2018_CHI – Who is SolarWinds?

2018_CHI – Solving for Scalability

2018_CHI – What’s New in Network Management?

2018_CHI – What’s New in Systems Management?

2018_CHI – User Experience at SolarWinds

2018_CHI – SolarWinds Academy

2018_CHI – SolarWinds Certified Professional

2018_CHI – NetPath Navigator

2018_CHI – Dashboards (Customer Spotlight)

2018_CHI – Beyond the Application Stack

[kmsigma]

Building my Orion Server [Scripting Edition] – Step 3.1

Building my Orion Server [Scripting Edition] – Step 3.1

Let’s forget all about my previous step 3. For the sake of argument, step 3 is dead, long live step 3.1!  Any script should be a living, breathing document which gets updated as needed.  In this case, it was needed.  Why would I burn such a good script to the ground?  Well, to be blunt, I’ve found a better way to do this, with better ultimate performance. (more…)

[kmsigma]

Photo Organization via PowerShell and Tags (Part 2)

Photo Organization via PowerShell and Tags (Part 2)

In Part 1of trying to tame my photos, I tried to wrangle my horribly organized photo library.  My organization skills were lacking, like many, when it comes to photos.  We take them, we import them or save them and then we… forget about them.  That’s a problem when I’m trying to handle large amounts of them (22.8 GB in 13,316 files) and organize them in ways that seem sensible.  To use this we…

[kmsigma]

Photo Organization via PowerShell and Tags

Photo Organization via PowerShell and Tags

No one could ever accuse me of being a shutterbug.  I’m more of a casual photographer and muchmost of that was from mobile devices.  But that’s not the be-all-end-all.  I’ve also got scores of scans of old photographs, screenshots, and a bunch of other graphics that have accumulated over the years.  Thankfully modern mobile devices tag photos with a plethora of information.  Now it’s just a…

[kmsigma]

Rapid Build for Testing Containers

Rapid Build for Testing Containers

Containers are everywhere and I’m, personally, behind the times.  I’d like to think that I’ve kept up with new technology trends, but on containers I was caught napping.  So now it’s time to really get cracking and for that I need to have a playground.  There are several online options available, but I’m cheap, so I’ve elected to create my own environment using Hyper-V.

To start things off, let…

[kmsigma]

Tech Conference Survival Guide: Celebration

Tech Conference Survival Guide: Celebration

Now that you’ve gotten ready for the climate and have done your preparation for the conference, it’s time to turn your attention to the celebration. (more…)

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NetFlow Repeater

So a friend of my mentioned an article that I posted 6 years ago on THWACK about a NetFlow Repeater.  I’ve since made some updates to this virtual machine even though the program at it’s heart (samplicator) hasn’t had any updates in the last few years (actually since 2015).  Here’s my latest version of that virtual machine. (more…)

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Tech Conference Survival Guide: Conference

Tech Conference Survival Guide: Conference

The first “C” of the Tech Conference Survival Guide is Climate where I explained how preparing for the summer season and technology conferences in climates maybe outside your comfort zones. The next “C” on our agenda is Conference. This is where I’ll talk about how to survive the conference itself. With so much coming up this year at VMworld, you need to plan in advance.

Badges, we need those…

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Tech Conference Survival Guide: Climate

Tech Conference Survival Guide: Climate

The transition from summer to autumn is the season of Tech Conferences.  Once again, I’ll be traveling to Las Vegas to partake in the splendor that is VMworld.  There are a few things to keep in mind when traveling to a technology conference.  For me, it splits into the three C’s: Climate, Conference, & Celebration. (more…)

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Patching Machines (or Shut-up Alerts!)

Patching Machines (or Shut-up Alerts!)

Over the years, I’ve worked for various organizations and most have had a fairly routine process for applying patches.  The best of these uses a defined Change Management window during which the patches were deployed and the computers rebooted (if necessary).  This post is not a recommendation on when to do this or how to do this.  This post is a recommendation on how to get SolarWinds Orion to…

[kmsigma]

Dungeon Mastering in IT

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) since I was about 16 years old.  It was also about that time (possibly coincidentally) that I also became engrossed with computing.  Not just watching-my-fake-family-die-from-dysentery computing, but how computers worked and why the field of computing was important. (more…)

[kmsigma]

Simulate User Message Sends leveraging EWS

If you’ve read any of my posts in the past, you know that I’ve got a lab at the office.  Part of this includes a handful of Exchange Servers.  To better simulate “real-world” (not stress-test) simulations, I want to send messages around the organization.  Thankfully, I’ve had some experience with Exchange Web Services (EWS) in the past. (more…)