1st November 2016 · Luca Sturlese

Installing Windows Features without Internet

Installing Windows features (most commonly .NET 3.5 or .NET 2.0) on a Windows 8, 8.1, 10 or Windows Server 2012 (R2) machine, generally requires you to be connected to the internet so that Windows can download the source files from Windows Update. But what happens when you don’t have internet access or if you are sitting behind a proxy and Windows Update is configured to point to WSUS or SCCM?

This post explains various ways to manually specify the source files in order to install the new Windows Feature. You will also learn how to configure the default source file path, so that all future Windows Features will install without any additional user involvement.

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17th October 2016 · Luca Sturlese

  VMware Cloud on AWS

Late last week, VMware and AWS announced a partnership where by VMware workloads will be able to run on AWS. The way it works is as you request the service, ESX hosts and a vCenter get spooled up and configured on bare-metal hardware within AWS datacentres.

This vCenter then connects to your existing environment and will allow for live vMotion of VMs between your on premise and the AWS cloud!

This is potentially a big shift in how companies will consume cloud services as essentially no re-architecture of applications is required to leverage the benefits of cloud – on demand, as-a-service model. ESX hosts and storage essentially become “unlimited” capacity, as at any moment you have the ability to request more resources! No lead times, no capital expenditure.

This is really cool and I think will make a big impact, especially for larger organisations. For more information check out the VMware Cloud on AWS website.

6th September 2016 · Luca Sturlese

  Designing cloud serverless architecture solutions

This article provides a world life example of how to design serverless architecture solutions in the cloud. I am yet to use the teletext.io (the solution they have developed), so I can’t comment on its relevance as a CMS but I can highly recommend the the way in which they have leveraged AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and S3 to build a completely serverless solution.

If you are interested in learning how to architect and develop solutions using modern day cloud principles then I highly recommend this article.

3rd September 2016 · Luca Sturlese

  Cleanup Active Directory using PowerShell

Active Directory is awesome, but for it to be effective it needs to be maintained and loved. An important maintenance step is cleanup, which involves removing objects that are no longer in use or required. These include:

  • User Accounts
  • Computer Objects
  • Empty Groups
  • Empty Organizational Units (OU)

Recently I wrote a guest article for Adaxes to cleanup Active Directory using PowerShell. Along with all of the details and how-to I developed a complete PowerShell toolkit that cleans up your Active Directory environment for you automatically. These tools can be scheduled and can be configured to search a certain scope, exclude certain types of objects and you can also choose the type of processing you want to do when you find inactive AD objects. The options available are report, disable and\or delete.

All of the details and links to the PowerShell scripts to get you started to cleanup Active Directory are available in the article on the Adaxes blog. Clicking on the title of this post will get you there.

21st August 2016 · Luca Sturlese

Getting started with the AWS SDK for PowerShell

The AWS SDK (for any language) is awesome and very powerful. Everything you can do in the AWS console you can do programatically which is why the AWS platform is so awesome to work with.

Getting started with using the AWS SDK can be a little daunting, so in this article we will be looking installing and configuring the AWS SDK for PowerShell so that you can get straight into automating your AWS environment.

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26th June 2016 · Luca Sturlese

Bypass the PowerShell Execution Policy

The PowerShell execution policy is a good feature from a security perspective, but in most cases it is just plain annoying, especially when running scripts from Group Policy, Task Scheduler, or some other sort of remote mechanism. This article shows you how to bypass the PowerShell execution policy on a machine so that you can run your script on a system irrespective of what execution policy is set.

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