40,000 Page Views

Looks like we just clocked over 40,000 page views!

Never really expected anyone to to read this blog when it started and it's really gratifying to know that what we're putting out there is helping people at least some of the time.

So a big thanks to all the Readers, Robots, Bots, Crawlers, Advertisers oh and actual honest to goodness humans that are making our page views climb!

Everyday Powershell - Part 32 - Create-TaskbarPinnedShortcut

So you may have a need to pin things to taskbars... We Certainly do apparently clicking on the start menu is a step too far for some users... Long and boring story.

Anyway here's some powershell.

$itemstopin = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\excel.exe", "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\outlook.exe", "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\winword.exe" foreach($item in $itemstopin){     $path = [system.io.path]::getdirectoryname($item)     $app = [system.io.path]::getfilename($item)     $shell = new-object -com "Shell.Application"     $folder = $shell.Namespace($path)      $item = $folder.Parsename($app)     $item.InvokeVerb('taskbarpin') }

All credit goes to this post on stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9739772/how-to-pin-to-taskbar-using-powershell I look at that site and often wonder how many programmers there really are versus how many cut and paste from there.

SOMEONE is writing all this code that the rest of us are copying. Wonder what the ratio really is?

Everyday Powershell - Part 31 - Send email with multiple attachments

So back in Part 24 reader sivaramsharma asked if send-mailmessage could handle multiple attachments so we threw together this post...

$files = get-childitem C:\reports | where name -like "*.png" $body = @() $attachments = @() foreach($file in $files){     $filename = [system.io.path]::GetFileName($file.FullName)     $attachments += $file.fullname     $body += "TEST <br /><img src='" + $filename + "'/>TEST <br />" } $body = $body | Out-String Send-MailMessage -to someuser@someserver.com -From someotheruser@someserver.com -SmtpServer somemailserver -Subject "Test" -BodyAsHtml $body -Attachments $attachments

It's a neat little example of generating some HTML in a loop then sending it off using send-mailmessage.

Everyday Powershell - Part 30 - Beware of reinventing the wheel

Hmmm bit of a funny one today... So I spent a few minutes writing this;

function get-recursegroupmembers{     [CmdletBinding()]     param     (         [Parameter(mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$True,ValueFromPipelinebyPropertyName=$True)]         [string]$groupname     )     $users = @()     $groups = get-adgroupmember $groupname     foreach($object in $groups){         if ($object.objectclass -eq "group"){             get-recursegroupmembers $object         }         if ($object.objectclass -eq "user"){             $users += $object         }     }     $users }

When I realised that this would do just fine;

get-adgroupmember $group -Recursive

So yeah, lesson for the day is don't spend valuable time writing stuff when the problem has already been solved.

Everyday Powershell - Part 29 - Add-SMTPAlias

It's funny. When you think about how many clicks you need to go through to add an SMTP alias to an Exchange mailbox... There's a lot of clicks! Or you could just use this function and be done in 5 seconds.

function Add-SMTPAlias{     <# Add-SMTPAlias     .SYNOPSIS Adds smtp alias to a given mailbox     .DESCRIPTION     .PARAMETER alias     Users Alias     .PARAMETER     newsmtpaddress desired email alias     .EXAMPLE     Add-IPToSMTPRelay -alias someuser -newsmtpaddress someusersotheremail@someserver.com      #>     [CmdletBinding()]     param (         [Parameter(mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]         $alias,         [Parameter(mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]         [mailaddress]$newsmtpaddress     )     process{         $emailaddresses = (get-mailbox $alias).emailaddresses         $emailaddresses += $newsmtpaddress.ToString()         try{             Set-Mailbox $alias -EmailAddresses $emailaddresses -ErrorAction stop         }         catch{             write-warning ("Problem setting email address " + $_)         }     } }

5 minutes or 5 seconds, the choice is yours GUI fans. Maybe it's time to give in to the power of the shell?

Everyday Powershell - Part 28 - Add-IPToSMTPRelay

Here's one that came up when we'd provisioned a new powershell integration server and couldn't send email from it!

Turns out our email server's weren't allowing it relay. So we needed to add it's IP to the RemoteIPRanges parameter and as Paul Cunningham  points out this can be tricky.

function Add-IPToSMTPRelay{     <#     Add-IPToSMTPRelay     .SYNOPSIS     Adds an IP address to the allow anonymous SMTP relay Receive connector on TMAIL     .DESCRIPTION     You will need to know your receive connectors name... use get-recieveconnector We only use one so it's been hard coded into the funtion, this could be parameterised if you need          .PARAMETER     IP IP Address to add to allowed anonymous SMTP relay      .EXAMPLE     Add-IPToSMTPRelay 192.168.1.1     #>     [CmdletBinding()]     param (         [Parameter(mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]         [ipaddress]$ip     )     process{         $remoteipranges = (Get-ReceiveConnector "smtp relays").remoteipranges         $remoteipranges += ($ip).ToString()         Set-ReceiveConnector "smtp relays" -RemoteIPRanges $remoteipranges     } }

You may be saying... "WOAH WOAH WOAH this looks different to your usual posts! What's all this function param process stuff?"

Well as you can see we wrapped up the powershell in a Function. The Comment block at the top is the help. The Param block defines any parameters in this case we've just got $IP. The process block is what actually happens and would be what we'd normally post.

This allows us to embed the function in a module and then stick the module in our powershell profile so it's always available!

This is far better than digging around in a scripts folder we'll dig into setting up a module in the next few weeks.

Everyday Powershell - Part 27 - Uploading files to a FTP server

Full credit to Goyuix for his awesome example on StackOverflow which I am shamlessly ripping off for this Post!

$logpath = "C:\SomePath" $ftpserver = "ftp://someFTP.com//" $user = "User" $password = "Password" $ftppath = "Somefolder" $todayslogs = Get-ChildItem $logpath | where {$_.CreationTime -gt ((get-date).AddDays(-1))} foreach($log in $todayslogs){     $uploadpath = $ftpserver + $ftppath + "/" + $log.Name      # create the FtpWebRequest and configure it     $ftp = [System.Net.FtpWebRequest]::Create($uploadpath)     $ftp = [System.Net.FtpWebRequest]$ftp     $ftp.Method = [System.Net.WebRequestMethods+Ftp]::UploadFile     $ftp.Credentials = new-object System.Net.NetworkCredential($user,$password)     $ftp.UseBinary = $true     $ftp.UsePassive = $true     # read in the file to upload as a byte array     $content = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes($log.FullName)     $ftp.ContentLength = $content.Length     # get the request stream, and write the bytes into it     $rs = $ftp.GetRequestStream()     $rs.Write($content, 0, $content.Length)     # be sure to clean up after ourselves     $rs.Close()     $rs.Dispose() }

This one was written to automate the upload of some logs. It happens every day so that's why we just (get-date).addays(-1) but that where on get-childitem can be anything you like.

One thing to note is the hardcoded password. You may not want to do this, depends on your security requirements. You can save the credentials in another file as a secure.string if you like. There's probably a post coming about that.