How to Use PipelineVariable
Put your hands up, have you ever bumped into the -PipelineVariable parameter in PowerShell cmdlets and wondered what it stood for? I have. But you use tab-completion when you are feeling lazy or want to get something done in a blink. Both these situations are not conductive to experimentation. What is a pipeline Think of cmdlets as little machine parts. Each takes an input, processes it and gives an output. You start with something raw, place it in the first machine, which processes it and gives you the output.
How to Add or Remove Users from Active Directory Groups
Active Directory has been one of my favourite tools in which I could automate repetitive processes. Starting from user additions to user deletions, clean-up, audits, all the way to new hire and user account termination process. Active Directory is a fantastic avenue for automation. And, who does not like hyper-efficient Active Directory administrators? I thought I would start a series on Active Directory automations. Today, we look at adding users to and removing users from Active Directory groups.
On code optimisation
As organisations move towards more automation, those that use Windows-based environments encourage learning PowerShell. Our organisation is one of these. This morning, we received a challenge: Before you leave for the holidays, the Elves in Accounting just need you to fix your expense report (your puzzle input); apparently, something isn’t quite adding up. Specifically, they need you to find the two entries that sum to 2020 and then multiply those two numbers together.
Moving to a new domain
I wanted to move the site from the old domain to a new one. The idea was to make this site a little more personal, and less snobbish. I picked the .io TLD. I liked it. The idea was also that I plan to make it not merely about PowerShell, but about infrastructure automation in general. The general plan I had in mind was: Buy ramiyer.io. Log into my DNS console and add entries to GitHub Pages IP addresses.
Bulk deletion of an email from mailboxes
I have been an Exchange administrator. (And I have fond memories of those days.) Exchange is often an overlooked, underappreciated aspect of Enterprise IT administration. Of course, this is 2020, and we are steadily moving away from emails, replacing it with the likes of Teams, Slack, Wire and what not. I had read an article a long time ago (which I cannot find anymore) that pointed out the inherent flaws in emails; emails were never meant to be secure.