Richard Siddaway's Blog

Scripting Games have started

The 2011 Scripting Games have started and this year its a PowerShell only contest.  Head over to http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/ to get the details of the first events

PowerShell UG meeting–April 2011–COM objects

When: Tuesday, Apr 12, 2011 7:30 PM (BST)

Where: Live Meeting
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

COM and see what we can do with COM objects in PowerShell and why COM is on the need know technology list as far as administrators are concerned.

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Creating a DHCP server

I needed to add a DHCP server to my Windows 2008 R2 test environment .  I know I can use the ServerManager Module for this so I import the module and use get-command to refresh my memory on the cmdlets

PS> Import-Module servermanager
PS> get-command -Module servermanager

CommandType     Name                                      Definition
-----------     ----                                      ----------
Cmdlet          Add-WindowsFeature                        Add-WindowsFeature [-Name] <Feature[]> [-Include...
Cmdlet          Get-WindowsFeature                        Get-WindowsFeature [[-Name] <String[]>] [-LogPat...
Cmdlet          Remove-WindowsFeature                     Remove-WindowsFeature [-Name] <Feature[]> [-LogP...

Now we can discover the DHCP related features

PS> Get-WindowsFeature *dhcp*

Display Name                                            Name
------------                                            ----
[ ] DHCP Server                                         DHCP
        [ ] DHCP Server Tools                           RSAT-DHCP

I need the server and the tools –  one command does it

PS> Add-WindowsFeature -IncludeAllSubFeature -Name DHCP, RSAT-DHCP

Success Restart Needed Exit Code Feature Result
------- -------------- --------- --------------
True    No             Success   {DHCP Server, DHCP Server Tools}

It took longer to write this post than to do the work!

PowerShell and VMware book

My good friends Jonathan Medd and Alan Renouf (together with a number of co-authors) have just had their book “VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration” published. More details on the book contents and for a chance to win a copy visit

http://www.jonathanmedd.net/2011/03/powercli-book-raffle.html

I’ll doing a full review of the book when I can get my hands on a copy

MVP award 2011

I received the email this afternoon to tell me my PowerShell MVP award has been renewed for another year. Its a great honour to receive an MVP award and I’d like to thank Microsoft for the award and the PowerShell community for the opportunities that have lead to the award.