Quickies

Mostly illustrating something amusing

ConfigMgr Tech Preview Install Guide

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Hey all,
After seeing Adam Gross’ very interesting content on CM TechPreview’s new AdminService feature, I immediately started to wonder how I could go about using it in place of remote WMI Operations.
So I connected to my stale Tech Preview Environment (it was TP 1806, lol!) and found it had expired 😢.
After googling for 14 seconds, I found no one had made a completely slap-dash guide to deploying the current version of CM Tech preview complete with all of the links you’ll need, so I decided to do that here.
note: I am assuming you’ve installed ConfigMgr **a lot of times** before this, so I won’t go too in-depth into what you need to do for each step.  Where relevant I provide a link to a post with the exact step you need to do, in case you’re not sure.

Have an AD domain

You must have a domain to setup ConfigMgr.  Womp womp.  If you need a domain controller, make a new Server 2019 VM and follow this blog post for a one-click domain controller install.

Make a Service Account

You don’t want to be stuck doing this when you get to the SQL Install step so do it now.  Make a new account and set it to never expire and give it limited perms.
Do not place it in Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins

Continue reading →

Quickie: ConvertTo-PSCustomObject

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Do you ever need to quickly hop between PowerShell tabs in VScode, or have data you want to move from one session to another?

Sure, you could output your data into a .CSV file, a .JSon file, or one of hundreds of other options.  But sometimes it’s nice to just paste right into a new window and get up and running again.  For that, I wrote this small little cmdlet.

 Function ConvertTo-PSCustomObject{
    Param($InputObject)
    $out = "[PSCustomObject]@{`n"
    $Properties = $InputObject | Get-Member | Where MemberType -eq Property
    ForEach ($prop in $Properties){
        $name = $prop.Name
        if ([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($InputObject.$name)){
            $value = $null
        }
        else {
            $value = $InputObject.$name
        }

        $out += "`t$name = '$value'`n"
    }

    $out += "}"
    $out
}

And the usage of it:

ConvertTo-PSCustomObject

Quickie – Join video files with PowerShell and FFMPEG

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Caption Text says 'Join Video Files quickly, gluing stuff with PowerShell and ffMpeg', overlaid on an arts and craft scene of glues, papers, scissors and various harvest herbs

While I’m working on some longer posts, I thought I’d share a quick snippet I came up with this weekend as I was backing up a number of old DVDs of family movies.

FFMPeg has the awesome ability to join a number of video files together for you, but the syntax can be kind of strange.  Once I learned the syntax, I sought to make sure I never had to do it again, and created this cmdlet.

Usage notes

In this basic version, it will join every file in a directory, giving you Output.mkv.  Be sure your files in the directory are sequentially ordered as well, to control their position.

Ensure that FFMpeg’s binaries are available in your Path variable as well.

Later on, I may add the ability to provide which specific files you want to join, if desired 🙂

Enjoy 🙂

Function Join-VideoDirectory {
$fileArray = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
$items = Get-childitem *.mkv,*.vob,*.mp4,*.ts
$itemCount = $items.Count
$i = 0
$cmdScript = ""
ForEach ($item in $items){
$i++
$cmdScript += "ffmpeg -i `"$($item.Name)`" -f mpegts -c copy file-0$i.mpeg.ts`n"
$fileArray.Add("file-0$i.mpeg.ts")
}
$cmdScript+="ffmpeg -isync -i `"concat:$($fileArray -join '|')`" -f matroska -c copy output.mkv"
Invoke-Expression $cmdScript
}

view raw
Join-VideoDirectory.ps1
hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

SOLVED! Windows 10 Reset – There was a problem resetting your PC

FoxDeploy26 Comments

solved

Windows 10 built on the awesome features of Windows 8, and brought over the very powerful ‘Refresh My PC’ and ‘Reset My PC’ options.  Truly awesome, they’re able to refresh the base OS and forklift over your files, giving you that ‘just installed’ smell we all love so much.

I love that smell so much in fact, that I buy a new car every few weeks, or sometimes sleep in cars at the CarMax down the road from my house.  Mmmmm plastic and leather offgas.

However, sometimes things go awry, and from no fault of our own, we can end up with a system which will refuse to either reset or refresh.  Read on to see how to fix this problem.   Continue reading →

SCOM: Quickly find Update Rollup Version

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It’s SO tedious to track down the update rollup version of SCOM, as the SCOM console still doesn’t have this information available (only major releases!), so you end up looking through the registry or digging into files trying to look at the file version manually.

I wrote this little script in PowerShell. Simply CD into the drive where SCOM is installed and it will track down the SCOM install directory for you, then pull out the Update rollup version and return it to screen.

Download