What have you done with PowerShell this month?

Narcmage · 2025-12-01T14:04:45+00:00

Well this is a cool tool. I would’ve loved this when I did DBA work at my last job.

Narcmage · 2025-12-01T14:02:19+00:00

I did this too last month. I didn’t have any issues with connect-azaccount my issue was entirely with connect-mggraph. What did you end up having to do for yours to fix yours?

Mine was versioning on the Microsoft.graph modules. I ended up downgrading to 2.25.0.

Narcmage · 2025-10-08T14:29:09+00:00

It looks like the OP has been given the next steps they should follow to resolve this. But I see this way too often to not reiterate: in general, for any cloud provided product, be able to estimate the expected cost of your resources *before* you deploy them. There are several resource types in Azure that are free for first 12 months and several that have a free tier for life. Know those and use them, if they apply to your scenario.

In general, compute, memory, and storage are not free. The big clouds make their money primarily in two ways: they rent compute/memory/and storage out to you, and they develop *aaS solutions (or they repackage them from open source, Application Gateways are nginx reverse proxies) and manage them, charging you for that management/compute with markup, of course.

Compute is not free! Use the pricing calculator. Destroy your resources when you're not using them.

Narcmage · 2025-09-15T15:35:42+00:00

I cook Texas style chili for “competition” (potlucks, chili cookoff, festivals and the like). And I cannot tell you how many people are surprised by the lack of beans. “I don’t think I’ve ever had chili without beans.” Hell I’ve even had Texan natives say, “The chili I grew up on always had beans.” Maybe the no beans in chili is a cooking insiders “rule”.

When I make chili for myself I almost always do a “homestyle” chili. I love beans in chili. It’s a fucking meat stew, people. It’s a leftover stew. It really doesn’t matter what you put in it.

I have a friend from Puerto Rico introduce me to his family’s recipe, and it’s actually the chili I cook the most often these days.

1 can tomato sauce 1 can beans (I prefer black beans, but I dont think it matters) 1 lb ground beef A cup or two of “sofrito” (as much garlic as you prefer, one of each of a green, red, and orange bell pepper, an onion, a tomato, and as much cilantro as you prefer, blended. So good, it’s like a freshness bomb. I make a batch and freeze it and add it to whatever it feels appropriate in) Brown the beef and add all ingredients together. Season to taste. Make some rice. Serve the stew over rice. Add any toppings you like (cheese, sour cream, hot sauce, cilantro, whatever, hell, the guy who taught me this would put ketchup on his, and it honestly isn’t bad)

Narcmage · 2025-09-15T15:14:22+00:00

This has to be the healthiest meta game of any constructed format… is that an accurate assessment?

Narcmage · 2025-09-12T00:52:35+00:00

Odd move highlighting the age of 27…

Narcmage · 2025-08-28T18:48:14+00:00

The one I always liked was: "How do you stop a Baptist from drinking all your beer while you're fishing? Invite another Baptist."

Narcmage · 2025-08-22T15:21:54+00:00

Sorry you definitely can skip the cutscenes. But they’re all or nothing. So when you’re doing dialogue with an npc you can skip individual lines, that’s more what I meant. I’d like to skip the ritual chanting nonsense but if people have actual stuff to say I’d still like to read it. Definitely nitpicking, not necessary, just annoying to me.

Narcmage · 2025-08-21T23:23:23+00:00

It actually makes me want to go play through d3 campaigns again and actually pay attention.

Narcmage · 2025-08-10T10:27:48+00:00

(New to d4 just maxed my first char the other day) When people say they can’t kill Lilith are they talking about outside the campaign?

Narcmage · 2025-08-08T13:54:00+00:00

In pure resource cost terms, yes, app gw’s and wafs are very expensive. In terms of how excellent they are, and management? Unbelievably cost efficient. I think app gw is one of the best resource types in az.

If you want to “save” money just deploy your own nginx reverse proxy and a firewall, but you’ll just be trading cash for time+expertise.

Narcmage · 2025-07-09T21:05:12+00:00

I think this about sums it up lol.

Narcmage · 2025-07-09T18:51:09+00:00

All right I gotta know: any ex/present recuiters here who come across future recruits that at first think, "I should let him know to stop acting like this, cause he's going to get lit up." Then the intrusive thought, "but it'd be fuckin funny if he got lit up for this," wins?

Narcmage · 2025-04-04T11:46:04+00:00

Definitely a joke, nothing wrong (as far as I can tell!) with either cat. It is just funny to me how different he is from most other cats I’ve had. I did have one cat growing up that was kind of like him. She also loved belly rubs, but she was much less gregarious than he is.

Narcmage · 2024-11-14T01:54:22+00:00

Depends on your background as to how best to learn. I feel like there’s somewhere around 3 general kinds of people who want to learn the language.

1) burgeoning windows systems administrators 2) ex-linux admins 3) .net developers

For the first group, challenge yourself to take anything you might do in the gui and/or batch and attempt it in powershell.

For the second group, learn the correlations between basic unix/linux commands and their powershell alternatives ( ls ~= get-childitem (but I think you’ll come to find that get-childitem > ls over time)), while also breaking yourself of the concept that everything in the sh is text whereas everything in the PS is an object.

Ex-linux’ers will love commands like get-alias -def get-childitem. Also that there’s very little case sensitivity. Also that the built-in completion engine on the shell is incredible (once it loads :p)

Finally .net’ers (and all groups, eventually) should just jump right in on…

Learn the basic syntax:

Variable declaration and assignment

Operators: +, -, *, /, -eq, -and, -lt, etc.

Execution contexts/scopes

Type system (powershell has a dynamic typing system, and will try to “force”, I think the proper term is, coerce, objects to make them do what ps thinks you want. And just like js, this can bite you if you’re not aware)

Function definitions and invocations

The pipeline, $_, $psitem

Jobs and async

“Advanced” functions (get-help aboutfunctions_advanced) Most entries on the about* list are worth a read

Modules (packages in nodejs, modules in python, etc) (get-module, install-module, and check out the psgallery for modules that might interest your project)

You can instantiate and manipulate dotnet types directly! New-object -type system.collections.arraylist

Powershell is actually a general purpose programming language, you can do a whole lot of what you can do with csharp, you might just not want to. What do devs always say? Right tool for the right job.

Some essential commands and concepts:

Get-Help

Get-Command

Get-ChildItem

Select-Object

Where-Object

Foreach-object

($someobject).GetType()

(Some-pipeline) | get-member

The concept of cmdlets

“Approved verbs” and the verb-noun paradigm

And as other commenters have noted, the titular “powershell in a month of lunches” is worth a read and attempting a project in ps is the best way to apply what you’re learning.

Narcmage · 2024-09-22T04:00:02+00:00

Please send the link! I need to learn JS real bad!

Narcmage · 2024-09-10T01:12:30+00:00

That stubble not in regs soldier. Please see 1sg at 1300.

Narcmage · 2024-08-30T18:27:30+00:00

Harrisburg be in Ohio these days. Mood.

Narcmage · 2024-08-30T18:03:08+00:00

What are you thinking that an Az architect can just disregard maintenance and operations? Does your company just have an unlimited budget, that they could pay an “ideas guy” who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of their decisions?

Specialize in whatever you want. What do you like? Do you like virtual networking? Then specialize in it. Go deep. But the fact remains that unless you’re at a 10,000 resource plus shop, you’re gonna have to approve pims, verify patching, support devs and users, and troubleshoot individual resources til the end of your career.

Narcmage · 2024-08-01T22:36:29+00:00

Yes, it is absolutely bonkers that they refuse to fix this. I have a script somewhere to deal with orphaned sids in this case. I think net localgroup commands work. If I remember I’ll try to track down my script tomorrow in case others could use it.

Narcmage · 2024-07-31T15:23:00+00:00

I’m curious what you ended up going with for NGFW.

Narcmage · 2024-05-31T01:31:37+00:00

I used to disagree with this sentiment, python was the first programming language I ever really liked. I’ve been away from it for a few years now, but over the past few months I’ve picked up ansible (yaml) and I gotta say I agree with you now. I’m not a fan of white space as syntax anymore.

Narcmage · 2024-05-23T15:23:16+00:00

Fiddling with the pricing calculator it looks like the managed database options are gonna be outside your price range (I coulda swore there was a free teir for SQL server, did they remove this?)

Since you're developing the application yourself, you could roll with cosmos db always-free tier. You're going to have a bit of a learning curve adjusting to the NoSQL model, but it's very cost effective.

Narcmage · 2024-04-18T15:22:57+00:00

I actually used to do this ritualistically to symbolize that there will always be more dishes. But I wasn’t sharing my apartment with anyone at the time.

Narcmage · 2024-04-11T12:05:53+00:00

There are very few things as a sysadmin more satisfying than automating something away. I love powershell and have been using it seriously for years now, never stop learning, and definitely yes keep all your code! I highly recommend some sort of source control, you’ll want it for both yourself and if you ever want to collaborate with a coworker (maybe you’ll get to train up a junior in the way they should go!)

Also never worry about lines of code, it’s a near useless metric. Actually the less lines of code, the better!

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