On Saturday i had a great day at “Barcamp9”. It was a successful event and this event is very well planned and very well managed by the event organizers.

In the “Barcamp9 Event”, we got lot’s of nice goodies like Barcaml9 printed T-Shirts, firefox sticker, magnet and pen.

unfortunately, no one was there to take my pictures , so i don’t have any of my event pics

You can download the event’s slides from the below link.

Download presentation from this link : http://www.slideshare.net/amandhally/use-powershell-to-make-your-life-easy

   

Few days back I upload a script on “Powershell Digital Clock”, when i was writing that script at that time another script idea strike in to my mind, that ideas was to create a Stopwatch using Powershell.

I don’t know writing a script for stopwatch is a good idea or not, but i know one thing that i will learn a new thing and that may be helpful in the future.

After thinking i started writing an GUI based script to creating a stopwatch.

Powershell has open lots of possibilities for system administrators like me. We just need to imagine what we want and we able to achieve it easily using Powershell.

Last week when i take a session in Delhi User Group meeting, i told attendees that Powershell is the most easiest scripting language to be learn.

Anyway.

In this “Stopwatch” i used 4 buttons, one to start the clock, One to stop the clock , one to reset the stopwatch and another is for the lap.

I am not so good in designing GUI so ignore the colour of the buttons ;o).

In this script i learn few new things.

Lesson Learned:

• System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class
• Few methods of System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class
• Make multiline textbox in powershell to auto scroll using

• $textBox1.SelectionStart = $textBox1.Text.Length;
  $textBox1.ScrollToCaret()

•  

“Screenshot of the script”

Please run this script in –Sta mode

Download Link : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17858935/StopWatch-Community-Edition.zip

   

This weekend i am doing another session on Powershell at barcam9. Please register for the event.

The topic for Powershell Session is : “Use Powershell to ease your life. ”

Website Link : http://barcampdelhi.org/

My session Details : http://connect.barcampdelhi.org/session/73

Registration : http://connect.barcampdelhi.org/Account/Register.aspx

Venue:
SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd.
Vatika Towers, 4th Floor
Sector 54, Golf Course Road
Gurgaon, Haryana – 122002
India

See you there….. )

   

On 20th April we had a half day Delhi user group meet at Microsoft office at Gurgoan.

I had a lots of fun there, I meet with different users, and some awesome Microsoft MVP’s.

To know about  upcoming Powershell events is Delhi/NCR area try to check my blog and stay tuned with Powerscripting Podcasts.

Pics:

Script Showed in the Presentation :

1. http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Ping-Multiple-Servers-ba915a7c
2. http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Ping-Multiple-Server-Using-4f4d3dd0
3. http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Ping-Multiple-Servers-and-df50cd28

Slide : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17858935/DelhiUserGroupPresentation-April2013.zip

   

Few days back i was writing an powershell GUI based script, in that script I need to add a clock.

First i thought how can i make a clock? I was thinking about an hour and then i got an idea. why not to use timer object and use it for creating an clock.

This is what i have done to create a GUI clock.

1. Created a blank form on “Powershell Studio”
2. Add a blank label to it
   1. 
3. Added a time object to it.
   1. 
4. In timer object property , i set Enabled to true, and interval to 1 {which is very low because the it is in milliseconds}
5. Double click on “Timer” object and i added the below code.
6. 
7. In above code , i am just converting, Get-Date to string.
8. and when you run scrip the outcome is running Powershell Digital clock.

Screenshot

You can download the script from here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17858935/Samay-Digital_Clock.zip

   

Download Link : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17858935/Samay-Digital_Clock.zip

Sometime, while using our regular or favourite cmdlets, we often forget to use non-regular, non-common cmdlets. When you look in to all cmdlets which powershell offers, you can see there may be few cmdlets which you never used and never notice them.

One of the cmdlet which i came to know is “Get-Location” whose alias is “pwd” (present working directory)

As its name defines , when you run it, it shows your location (not GPS one ), it shows you that  in which folder you currently working in.

this cmdlet is very useful when you want to record you current folder location in to the powershell scripts.

This cmdlet has three main properties.

1. Path
2. Drive
3. Provider

To check these properties we can put Get-Location in to a variable.

$location = Get-Location

to know the path of the current location we can type $location.Path property.

To know the name and other information, we can use $location.Drive property.

to know the PS Provider type, we can use $location.Provide property.

That’s all for now.

   

In my previous Article i post about how to create encrypted folder using powershell script. In encryption the most important thing is the backup of encryption certificate. We can export and save encryption certificate manually from control panel , using MMC and Certificate Snap-in or using cipher.exe.

But as we all love to use scripts , we can use a powershell scrip to export efs security certificate.

Download Link : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17858935/Export-EFS-Certificate-Powershell_Script.zip

You can download the script and run it, this script will export the EFS Security Certificate to your “My Document” or “Document Folder”.

I did not write this script, i have found it somewhere on the internet and lost is original source, and i also tweaked this script according to my need.

Download Link : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17858935/Export-EFS-Certificate-Powershell_Script.zip

   

Windows Encryption is one of the best inbuilt security tool in windows7. My and my friends use windows encrypted file systems (EFS) a lot and may be you are using EFS in your windows environment.

Rather that create a whole DISK, My Documents, Desktop encrypted, I always prefer to create an encrypted folder somewhere on the disk and then put the files which you want to be encrypted in that encrypted folder.

I have written a small Powershell Script which created a encryption enabled folder on your desktop with folder name “Encrypted-Folder”.

You can download the script from this link : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17858935/Create_encrypted_Folder_Using_Powershell_v3_Community.zip

Script Logic

I have created a small flow charts on how this script works.

How it works.

1. This script check for folder name “Encrypted-Folder” on your Desktop.
2. If the Folder Exists.
   1. then it check if the attributes of the “Encrypted-Folder” is contains encrypted.
      1. If the Folder Attributes on “Encrypted-Folder”  contains “Encrypted”
      2. Then it won’t do anything.
      3. but
      4. If the Folder attributes doesn’t contains “Encrypted-Folder” 
      5. then
      6. it runs “cipher /e” command to make folder encrypted
3. If the folder Does not exists,
   1. then this create a new folder “Encrypted-Folder”  on your desktop
   2. and encrypt it.

In this script i am using “cipher /e” to enable encryption. I have tested this script on windows7 and windows8 and it is working fine for me.

Screenshots.

Download Link : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17858935/Create_encrypted_Folder_Using_Powershell_v3_Community.zip

That’s all for now.

   

There are millions of software available on the internet, lots of them are free and lots of them are paid. Sometimes we thinks that only PAID software are good, but that is not true, there are lots of great software which are freely available on the internet.

Top Five free Software for IT Administrators.

1. 7zip
2. Putty
3. Notepad++
4. WinDirStat

7zip

7zip is one of the best free software for zip/unzip files. It does support lots of file extensions like .7z, .zip, .rar, .tar , .bzip , .iso.

7zip also have a strong command line interface too.

How to zip files using 7zip?

it’s simple.

1. Right click on the file or folder which you want to zip,
2. choose 7zip and click on “file/foldername.zip”
3. That’s all
4. 

Download Link : http://www.7-zip.org/download.html 

Putty

Putty is the one of the best friend for administrators who works on Linux and Windows simultaneously. Putty is used to connect to Linux servers using SSH protocol. It also support Telnet, Raw, Serial and Rlogin protocols.

How to use Putty?

1. Open Putty.
2. Type the hostname or IP of the Linux machine and click on Open.
3. 
4. Now it ask you to provide username and password on the remote linux machine
5.  
6. 
7. Once you provide the username and password , you are in to the machine.
8. 
9. That’s all.
10. 

You can download putty from this link: http://www.putty.org/ 

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a great replacement of Notepad. It had great inbuilt features. You can use it as simple text editor or you can also use script editor. It has color coding for HTML,BAT,VBS, XML and lots of other formats.

Batch File Coding.

Html color coding.

download link : http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ 

WinDirStat

WindirStat is a must have tool for IT Admins. You  can run this tool on a Drive and you able to see the folder size of all folders and even you can see which files are consuming most of the disk space.

How to use WindirStat ?

1. Open WindirStat
2. Choose the Drive on which you want to scan and click on OK,
3. 
4. Once it finished scanning all folders, it will show you full report.
5. 

Download Link : http://windirstat.info/