Interacting with the Ruckus Cloudpath API using PowerShell

It’s been a while since posting and I do hope to sort that out but for now another quick mention of some work with Ruckus Cloudpath. Although massively flexible in its design I’ve come into a few niche cases where administrators would like a single DPSK pool (which is bound to a single SSID) but where different users have different… Read more



PRTG REST API, PowerShell and UTF8

An issue that I’ve now run into a few times now so I thought it was worth a blog post – if you are using the REST Custom sensor within PRTG Network Monitor you may see the error below if you have generated your REST configuration using PowerShell. XML: The returned XML does not match the expected schema. (code: PE233)… Read more



Backing up a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall with PowerShell

For some time there have been plenty of examples of backing up Palo Alto Firewalls with curl commands (extracting the files using the XML API) however that may not sit well with some Windows administrators who want to use PowerShell. As such I’ve put together the BackupPANNGFWConfig repo on GitHub which contains the scripts to get ahold of the API… Read more



From around the web, Tuesday 9th July 2019

In this new blog post series I’ll be looking at (normally a selection of 3) cool articles, news and other blog posts that I find interesting during the day. For this week we have PowerShell tricks, a detailed article on securing the Windows Firewall and an (old but very interesting) write up on the woes of network administrators when everything… Read more



Set the default new file for VS Code to PowerShell (or something else!)

Having recently changed from using PowerShell ISE to VS Code I’m still discovering all the super awesome new features of it (be sure to get a copy of the Keyboard shortcuts from this page – https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/keybindings). To get started I’ve changed the default new file language to PowerShell (not that you can’t change it to anything else though!). To do this… Read more



College IT Conference 2018 – Deploying and Managing Microsoft Services with PowerShell on Windows Server Core

Thanks to the organising committee of the (Oxford and Cambridge) College IT Conference 2018 held at the RAF Museum (Hendon) for the invite to talk about PowerShell and Server Core! As promised the video from the presentation is now up on YouTube; in addition the slides as PowerPoint and PDF can be seen below. <span class=”mce_SELRES_start” style=”width: 0px; line-height: 0;… Read more



IT Open Day at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

With thanks to the 50 staff from across the University for attending please see below the links to the videos and PowerPoints of the day! Direct link to Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLRxbdlgJzwyjAf820T0u4GpP0E01a9LEX&v=u-GVJ_0VuRM Slides as PowerPoint Slides as PDF Stay tuned over the coming days for the scripts that are mentioned through the video which will be linked to from this post.



A little fun with PowerShell and Milestone XProtect (read the config.xml file and get a list of Devices and Cameras)

A little bit of fun today with Milestone XProtect (in our case the express version) today; with the goal of improving our documentation I wanted to somehow obtain a list of all of the hardware devices (and to some degree the cameras) including there names, MAC addresses and IP addresses from our XProtect server. Lone behold the configuration.xml file typically… Read more



A Windows SysAdmin installs and uses OpenVAS – End to end guide – Simple Beginnings

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series A Windows SysAdmin installs and uses OpenVAS

Following on from the previous post (A Windows SysAdmin installs and uses OpenVAS – End to end guide – Simple Beginnings) in this post we’ll be using PowerShell, OpenVAS and the OMP (Open Management Protocol from Greenbone) to create a Target (a machine/device) to conduct some Pen Testing against, create a Task to scan the target and then generate a… Read more



Managing Sympa (Mailing Lists) with PowerShell (v1.0)

If you are running (or use) the Sympa Mailing List but also use Windows PowerShell then you may want to be aware of PSSympa which recently went v1.0 on GitHub and the PowerShell Gallery. In this release we have… Functions Get-SympaLogin (to login and get a session cookie – the result of which is used with all other functions) Get-SympaMailingListMember… Read more