Managing Azure with PowerShell - A Spiceworks Blog Series

One of my fun tasks these days is being a group administrator and moderator on Spiceworks community forums. The forums are IT Pro focused and include a great group dedicated to all things PowerShell. If you have issues or questions, you are most welcome to come on over and post away. If you know PowerShell, we'd love to have more folks answering the torrent of questions we get.

In that role, Spiceworks asked me to create a series of blog posts on the Spiceworks Cloud blog which covers PowerShell and how you use it in the context of Azure. I offered to update some of the content in my upcoming book (See http://tfl09.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/my-next-powershell-book.html for details). The publisher (Packt Publishing) kindly agreed.

The first article, Introduction to Managing Azure Services Using Windows PowerShell, was posted this week. The next blog post, which looks at getting the modules you need to manage  Azure whould be posted sometime next week. A third article on the basics of Azure storage and how to create an SMB share (and access the share across the Internet) is planned and should follow on in due course.

I have a number of additional posts to create, including one on building a Virtual Machine, and another on virtual networks and creating a P2S VPN into the VM. I am very much open to suggestions for more in this series.

PSHSCripts.Blogspot.Com – 2 years On!

Just over 2 years ago, I created a new blog, The PowerShell Scripts blog over at http://pshscripts.blogspot.com. The idea was simple – a blog with single function PowerShell scripts. Scripts that demonstrated one (or at least a very small number) of things to do with PowerShell. I had in mind that since the blog was hosted by Google, they’d do a good job of indexing it, and providing links to it. Which is exactly what happened.
In the two years, I’ve had over 65,000 visitors to the blog. At present, I’m getting around 170 hits per day and just under 300 page hits per day on average over a week. However, this is very much a week day blog with Monday-Friday tending to be closer to 200+ hits/day during the week.
But the interesting, and gratifying, thing is the percentage of hits coming from the key search engines (Google and more recently Bing) and the search terms they are using. I’ve used a free traffic counter from sitemeter to measure the traffic, but I only see the last 1000 visitors and had not added a more permanent tracking system – but I’ve recently added Google Analytics the site. So far, the results from both sites show the same tends.
Looking at the Analytic's output for the past month. around 70% of all the traffic to the blog comes from Google and Bing with a bit more from PowerShell.com, TechNet and this blog. There are a few other search engines that send traffic, but Google and Bing are dominant.  Also, around 13% of the traffic comes from direct hits on http://pshscripts.blogspot.com. 
Looking at the search terms used is also interesting. PowerShell Scripts (and PowerShell script) make up 18% or all hits. Below those two, there’s a very long tail of relatively low numbers of hits over the past month. There were just around 1000 separate search terms used – and all but a handful more than once or twice. That shows that the narrow focus of each post has proven useful – you can search with a fairly narrow term, such as “PowerShell ipaddress wmi” or “powershell send udp” and see the blog at the top or near the top of the 1st page.
There were two discoveries that were curious. First, looking at the referring sites, I noticed one site had a relatively high number of pages per visit and a long time too on average time on site. The bounce rate for this traffic was also very very low. It turns out that an IT professor in Viet Nam has put a link to my blog and all the slides from the upcoming PowerShell V2 class. Not sure about the legality of putting the slides up – but see for yourself at http://hoanguyen40.ecoles.officelive.com/OSScripting.aspx.
The other amusing thing I found is that, when looking at the networks that send you traffic (think ISP). The top network listed was Microsoft!
All in all, a good first two years for this blog – getting several hundred hits a day is more than I expected.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,PowerShell Scripts,PowerShell Scripts blog

Official Microsoft Team Blogs

Over the past few years, Microsoft has gotten big on blogging. A number of employees blog their activities to a personal blog. Additionally, a number of product teams blog, as a team. Some of these, such as You Had Me At EHLO (The Exchange Team Blog) are fantastic, with re rest mostly very good.

Naturally, there's a page to see an Official list of Microsoft Team Blogs / Microsoft Blogs!

There is some great information here -if you have the time to read it all!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Blogs,blogs

PowerShell CZ – Another PowerShell blog (In Czech)

Sadly, I don’t speak Czech – if I did, the PowerShell CZ blog would be more useful. Nevertheless, some of the articles are clear enough to PowerShell folks – just look at the code posted in the article. I tried the translator at www.tranexp.com, but the results were not very good.
Maybe the author could be persuaded to translate into English?

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,blog

PowerShell Bloggers via Yahoo Pipes

Jakul has created a Yahoo Pipes mashup, PowerShell Bloggers, that keeps up with (at present) 42 separate PowerShell (or PowerShell related) web logs. This includes my own Scripts blog! This is both a useful end product to help folks keep up with other community generated content, but Pipes is also a pretty cool tool to enable you to create your own mashups.

Technorati Tags: mashup,Yahoo Pipes,Powershell,PowerShell Bloggers,blog

Swiki - from Eurekster

A swiki is a "custom social search portal on a topic of your choice", says Eurekster.com. In effect, a swiki is a widget you put into a web page and chose the topics that you are interested in. Eurekster then creates a tag cloud based on the tags you supply. What's nice is that as others use your swiki, they can vote on certain search hits, to help the gadget generates more and more relevant content.

I've been playing around with this and have created a PowerShell-Stuff swiki, and have placed it onto this blog. I've also put an OCS-Stuff swiki over on my corporate blog. are these useful/interesting/helpful??

Technorati tags: swiki, Eurekster.com, blog

Moved over to Blogger Beta

I've just moved this blog over to the new Blogger Beta. Maybe a dangerous thing to do, but we'll see! 

[Later]

The integration between Blogger beta and Live Writer is not perfect - LW could not download the styles from Blogger. I had to reset the Live Writer settings for the blogs and in doing so, I can't seem to download the blog's styles into Live Writer. I can still post, which is probably good enough.

Technorati tags: Live Writer, Blogger Beta

TechEd Bloggers

Being quoted on TechEd Bloggers home page is not quite like getting Slash-dotted, but still fun. The bit cited on the TechEd Bloggers site is not quite the full story. The build is pretty stable, and works reasonably well - this bodes well. As a consumer OS, it'll sell well (if only because any OEM version of Windows sells well). It looks pretty too.

The bit of my earlier post cited by the TechEd Bloggers site related to the "move things around because we can" problem. Here are just two examples. First, in XP, you could right click the desktop background, select properties to open up the desktop properties. There was a single tabbed dialog box with all the options. But in Vista this is all changed. Your right click on the desktop brings up a Personalise (SIC) option. This is a menu listing the individual tabs in XP's dialog box and a bit more. Clicking some of those just brings up a (single tabbed!!!) dialog box which looks much like one tab in XPs's dialog. Clicking others brings up new windows. All very confusing and to me just adds more complexity to the process. At a very minimum lose the tab in the XP-cloned dialogs. A singe dialog needs both a window title and a tab why? Oh - and by the way, the window title and tab title are not really consistent in terms of what they display anyway!

The second example is the Desktop icons. In Win2k, the default desktop had a bunch of icons (the computer, IE, etc) in a particular order. In XP this changed to nothing being displayed, but you could change to a default order by clicking down into desktop properties. In Vista, this is done a different way, and the default order displayed are different. I like the ability to display the control panel - but why did the order have to change?

Compatibility is not quite there, but that's to be expected. I'm certain this is going to get better as Vista drives towards release. Also, the UI has butchered my beloved Turnpike. Turnpike looks so awful under Vista, I'm actually considering finding a new mail and news client. After using the product for something like 10 years, I'm reluctant. I'd really like a "compatibility mode for shell extensions that looked cool in XP" feature.

Another thing that jumps out is how much bigger Vista is than XP. Vista now comes on a DVD, roughly 6 times the size XP, if I have my maths right. The Windows folder alone is just a tad under 7GB! And after a day's running, the background memory usage is 1.3GB. I'm struggling to understand this apparant bloat. While there is some really great eye-candy and the stabilty is good, Vista is going to represent a wholesale replacement of my home network. While it all works fine under XP and Win2k3, several of my machines are just too long in the tooth for Vista. I suspect this may be true of many corporate clients.

But the thing that bugs me the most is UAP. This can not have passed the Jim Alchin's Mom test, and gets me angry every time it kicks in. Trying to delete windows.old (the folder the 5365 installer created from the previous build of vista on this box) has taken hours to complete. The combination of permissions, and the need to ask for admin priveleges drives me nuts. The think that makes least sense is that Vista doesn't make me enter admin credentials, just to click twice - with a couple of 2-3 second pauses in between. Now what is the point in that?? I really hope Vista RTM will have an easy way to turn this stuff off!!

Does anyone actually read this stuff?

Folks writing blogs spend all that time and effort, typing stuff in, looking at it as it's published, updating it, fixing the spelling mistooks, re-drafing stuff that's unclear, etc, etc, etc. But then what? Does anyone ever read this blog? If you do, mail me at [email protected] - I'd be interested if anyone at all is reading this!

My Blog - Ready or not - First Blog Post

It seems like everyone is setting up a blog - so I thought I'd do it too. I'm not too sure what real use I'll make of this blog, but it seems a cool idea. I'm currently using blogger.com to host this blog. It's free (to me) and has no ads.

I'm taking a security trainer preparation class this week - learning about security. The more I learn the scarder I get! The class is being run by Dave Shaw, a US trainer, who's doing a great job bringing the stuff to life. Dave, like me, is an MVP!