Introduction to Chef + DSC

Over the last year I have really started playing with Desired State Configuration. This is another player in the increasingly crowded 'Infrastructure as Code' market. Other major players being Ansible, Salt, Chef, and Puppet, to name a few. I remember when I was researching some of the different available tools I ended up searching for …

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Testing Infrastructure with Pester

This post is about using Pester for infrastructure validation (Skype for Business is used for the example infrastructure). So what is Pester? They describe it very well on their wiki:  "Pester provides a framework for running Unit Tests to execute and validate PowerShell commands. Pester follows a file naming convention for naming tests to be …

RTC vs Cs Groups in Skype for Business (and some issues)

This post is an attempt to clear up some of the confusion regarding the difference between the RTC groups and the Cs groups (also known as the RBAC groups) within Skype for Business. These security group types vary in some important ways and have implications for how administrative privileges need to be setup. Thanks to …

Exploring the Powershell Alternative to netstat

This post is going to be a very quick rundown of Get-NetTCPConnection, the Powershell cmdlet that serves as a powerful alternative to netstat. Note: In any comparisons I make between netstat and Get-NetTCPConnection, I am referring to the Windows implementation of netstat. Why you might want to use Get-NetTCPConnection Easier to get targetted information by …