Powershell- Powertips: Setting Mouse Position

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.PowerShell can place the mouse cursor anywhere on your screen. Here's the code:[system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Forms") | Out-Null[System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position = New-Object System.Drawing.Point(500,100)This would have placed the cursor at x=500 and y=100. ...

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Powershell - Powertips: Comparing Services

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.Compare-Object can help when troubleshooting computers. For example, you should try this to compare the service status on two machines and find out where services are configured differently:$machine1 = Get-Service –ComputerName server1-or-IP1$machine2 = Get-Service –ComputerName server2-or-IP2Compare-Object –ReferenceObject $machine1 –DifferenceObject $machine2 –Property Name,Status –passThru | Sort-Object Name | Select-Object Name, Status, MachineN...

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Powershell - Powertips: Checking Whether User or Group Exists

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.To find out whether a given local or domain user/group exists, you can simply use the static method Exists():[ADSI]::Exists(’WinNT://./Tobias1‘)This will check whether there is a local account named "Tobias1". To check domain accounts, you can simply replace "." with your domain name, or use LDAP:[ADSI]::Exists(’LDAP://CN=Testuser,CN=Users,DC=YourDomain,DC=Com‘) ...

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Powershell - Powertips: Reading Text Files as One Chunk

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs.In a previous tip, you learned how to quickly read in text files. The result was a string array. If you want to read the text as one large string ultrafast, you can use this approach:[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText(“c:\somefile.tx...

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Powershell - Powertips: Reading Text Files Fast

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.Let's assume you want to read a large text file. Let's create one:Get-Process | Export-CLiXML $home\data.xml(Dir $home\data.xml | Select-Object –expandProperty Length)/1MBIt should be roughly 5MB in size. Now let's read it using Get-Content:Measure-Command { Get-Content $home\data.xml }Now, you should check this out:Measure-Command { [System.IO.File]::ReadLines(“$home\data.xml“) }You will find the second approach is 20 times fas...

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Powershell - Powertips: Making Your Keyboard Sound like Typewriter

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.PowerShell is all about typing. But if you'd like to get back the old-fashioned typewriter sound, here is a freeware tool that can bring it back: http://www.grc.com/freeware/clickey.h...

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Powershell - Powertips: Disabling Automatic Page Files

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.If you would like to programmatically control page file settings, you can use WMI but must enable all privileges using -EnableAllPrivileges. The code below will disable automatic page files:$c = Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem -EnableAllPrvileges$c.AutomaticManagedPagefile = $false$c.Put() ...

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Powershell - Powertips: Eliminating Duplicate Words

I get emails from powershell.com that are worth sharing (and remembering). These are not my scripts. Signup for daily PowerTips here: http://powershell.com/cs/.Let's assume you want to eliminate duplicate words in a text. Here is how you can do this:'this text text contains duplicate words words following each other' -replace '\b(\w+)(\s+\1){1,}\b', '$1' ...

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Powershell - Automate HTTP POST Process

I was trying to figure out a way to automate testing a form with HTTP POST. I found this link:http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/tips/archive/2010/04/29/sending-post-data-via-powershell.aspxIt gave me the base and with just a few quick tweaks I got it running with the following script:function spam{$url = "http://www.theboard.com/post_item.aspx"$parameters = "name=test=&subject=test&body=test body."$http_request = New-Object -ComObject Msxml2.XMLHTTP$http_request.open('POST', $url, $false)$http_request.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")$http_request.setRequestHeader("Content-length", $parameters.length)$http_request.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close")$http_request.send($parameters)$http_request.statusText}To validate some load stress, I just automated...

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TSQL - Varbinary Cast

We use a web application to manage much of our system security. Much like Windows, we use a role based security system (think user groups). When creating new user groups we often reference standard user group names. Some of these names are stored in a Word document. So, when a hyphen (i.e., short dash) is entered into Word followed by a dash, it is automatically converted into an "en dash". This is when the single dash is expanded and looks "wider" than normal.Since we run some scheduled tasks to regularly perform functions based on user group names this automatic formatting feature of Word becomes an issue. The script looks explicitly for the hyphen (ASCII decimal code 45/hexidecimal code 2D) but finds the en dash (ASCII decimal code 150/hexidecimal code 96). For reference,...

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TSQL - Search Column for PCI Cardholder Data

I needed to get my head around dynamically searching all fields in a given set of database tables for PCI Cardholder Data. I had previously come up with a rudimentary query to search for credit card numbers:http://learningpcs.blogspot.com/2009/03/credit-cards.htmlThis time, however, I wanted to try and handle it all via SQL. For starters, I needed to determine which fields I wanted to work with. My initial query (from the link above) was:SELECT SO.name, SC.nameFROM sysobjects AS SOJOIN syscolumns AS SCON SO.ID = SC.IDWHERE (SO.xtype = 'U') AND (SC.name LIKE '%_SUFFIX')I needed something more powerful. I started with this link:http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/337The basic query provided here was:SELECT table_name=sysobjects.name,column_name=syscolumns.name,datatype=systypes.name,length=syscolumns.lengthFROM...

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Powershell - Bruce Payette ql Function

While reviewing some of Shay Levy's Powershell on Luhn validation:http://scriptolog.blogspot.com/2008/01/powershell-luhn-validation.htmlI noticed a comment referring to Bruce Payette's ql function trick. Having never heard of this, I Googled a bit and found this:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2007/03/01/year-of-the-pig-revisited-the-magic-of-ql.aspxUsing the following function:function ql{ $args}you can save yourself a lot of typing. For instance, if you want to just enter a long string within having to retype it, you can use this pattern:function ql {$args}ql Pig Rat Ox Tiger Rabbit Dragon Snake Horse Goat Monkey Rooster Dogwhich will then proceed to echo back all the content of the $args collection in order.PigRatOxTigerRabbitDragonSnakeHorseGoatMonkeyRoosterDogIn the context...

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Powershell - Delete Temporary Internet Files

I can't recall how I got interestd in trying to delete temporary internet files with Powershell, but, after much digging I came across this link:http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ITCG/thread/1511ac62-0d48-4c8e-837e-11940a5b7b94After checking out the link, Richard's blog:http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/07/12/cookie-time.aspxhad a great entry. I was originally looking to see if the inetcpl.cpl (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=574) some sort of COM interface, but, none ever surfaced. As I dug around the COM object I went through each level to get a feel for what sort of aspects of the object were exposed via the COM interface.Here are my walkdown steps:Create the reference:$app = New-Object -ComObject Shell.ApplicationGet members...

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DNS - Where are settings stored?

After wrestling with some DNS issues I wanted to know where the DNS data was actually stored on a machine. It took me a while to find this link:http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2networking/thread/7d7adbb7-f0a3-4292-9417-4024081dd782Apparently you have to log onto the DNS server and look in the %SystemRoot%\System32\DNS\ directory; the file name I worked with was mydomain.myhost.com.dns where mydomain.myhost.com was the domain name of my environment. Basically, look for a file with the .dns extension. When I looked at the DNS server on our domain I realized it looked a lot like the regular hosts file found on client machines (%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts), but, with significantly more entries. I don't know if the example from this link:http://zytrax.com/books/dns/ch6/mydomain.htmlis...

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Powershell - Base64 Functions

Since I am slowly building up a Powershell Pen Testing suite, I wanted to grab a few fuzzing functions. The Base64 functions outlined here:http://www.techmumbojumblog.com/?p=306have been helpful for input and URL analysis. To save myself the trouble of reinventing this from time to time I am adding it to the $profile.AllUsersAllHosts profile on my machine to allow me to call the code I need in a jiffy. I am even aliasing them to make life easier. Here are the functions:# http://www.techmumbojumblog.com/?p=306function ConvertTo-Base64($string) { $bytes = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($string); $encoded = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($bytes); return $encoded;}function ConvertFrom-Base64($string) { $bytes = [System.Convert]::FromBase64String($string); $decoded...

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Powershell - WinNT Provider

I reimaged my Windows 7 machine and want to make a new account strictly to contain pen testing tools. Wondering how I could do this the Powershell way I started looking around. Most everything I found related to domain user management, i.e., LDAP and ADSI. In my case, I was not dealing with AD per se, but, rather the WinNT provider to add a local account. I stumbled onto this post:http://www.vistax64.com/powershell/173919-add-built-account-local-group-using-winnt-adsi-provider.htmlwhere Shay Levy added this little nugget:$group = [ADSI]"WinNT://$env:COMPUTERNAME/Administrators,group"$group.add("WINNT://NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM")I thought okay, great, I've got something to work with. My next step was MSDN to try and find some higher level info to work with. This link came up on Google,...

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Powershell - Function: Show-UserFlagsEnum

In the wake of my last post, I didn't really want to have to look up the UserFlags enum one more time. So, I created a simple function to display this text.function Show-UserFlagsEnum{Write-Host "Explore this more at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa772300`ADS_UF_SCRIPT = 1, // 0x1`ADS_UF_ACCOUNTDISABLE = 2, // 0x2`ADS_UF_HOMEDIR_REQUIRED = 8, // 0x8`ADS_UF_LOCKOUT = 16, // 0x10`ADS_UF_PASSWD_NOTREQD = 32, // 0x20`ADS_UF_PASSWD_CANT_CHANGE = 64, // 0x40`ADS_UF_ENCRYPTED_TEXT_PASSWORD_ALLOWED = 128, // 0x80`ADS_UF_TEMP_DUPLICATE_ACCOUNT = 256, // 0x100`ADS_UF_NORMAL_ACCOUNT = 512, // 0x200`ADS_UF_INTERDOMAIN_TRUST_ACCOUNT = 2048, // 0x800`ADS_UF_WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT = 4096, // 0x1000`ADS_UF_SERVER_TRUST_ACCOUNT = 8192, // 0x2000`ADS_UF_DONT_EXPIRE_PASSWD = 65536, // 0x10000`ADS_UF_MNS_LOGON_ACCOUNT...

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Powershell - Get-EventLog Message Truncated

In efforts to automate some log monitoring/searching I turned to the Get-EventLog cmdlet. After getting it up and running I always have problems with the Message being truncated to a single line ended with an ellipsis. To get around this I Googled up this post:http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Scripting/Powershell/Q_25029432.htmlAlthough the main emphasis of the post was answered by a response emphasizing something else, I did find this nugget by Learnctx:get-EventLog application -newest 2000 | where {$_.entryType -match "Error"} | where{$_.source -match "vmauthd"} | where{$_.timewritten -match $tdate} | format-table timewritten, message -wrap -autosize | Out-File -filepath c:\test.txtFrom within this reply I got the command:format-table timewritten, message...

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Utility - Freecorder

A friend came to visit and was telling me about a song in the middle of a video stream she loved. I decided I'd go find a way to chop the portion of the stream she wanted. After I Googled up this post:http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/how-to-capture-save-record-or-download-streaming-audio-for-free/I downloaded the tool and it worked pretty well. The only downside is that it installs on IE and Firefox at this point. About half the time I use Chrome, so, I was a little disappointed to see it wasn't an opt...

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Video - Advanced .NET Debugging (John Robbins)

While digging around for some old materials I came across these three links on Channel 9:http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/egibson/msdn-simulcast-techniques-in-advanced-net-debugging-with-john-robbins-part-1-of-3http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/egibson/MSDN-Simulcast-Techniques-in-Advanced-NET-Debugging-with-John-Robbins-Part-2-of-3http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/egibson/Simulcast-Techniques-in-Advanced-NET-Debugging-with-John-Robbins-Part-3-of-3Each of these links has the respective downloads (I went with the high quality wmv files):http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/5/0/1/5/4/5/AdvancedNETDebugging1_2MB_ch9.wmv http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/6/0/1/5/4/5/AdvancedNETDebugging2_2MB_ch9.wmv http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/6/1/1/5/4/5/AdvancedNETDebugging3_2MB_ch9.wmv These have been out...

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Powershell - List Shares

Our datacenter had some power issues and I needed to quickly determine if our SAN had come back online. The quickest way I could come up with was a gwmi call to the remote machine. My first effort was on the Win32_LogicalDisk class:gwmi -class Win32_LogicalDisk -computer 192.168.0.14 | select deviceid,drivetype,status,mediatype,access,volumename | ft -autoIf you are not familiar with this class, check out the definition at MSDN:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394173(v=vs.85).aspx To get a better idea, as this didn't actually list shares but rather all drives, I used the Win32_Share class:gwmi -class win32_share -computer 192.168.0.14 | select name,statusFor more information on this class check out this page:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394435(v=VS.85).aspxInterestingly...

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Powershell - Switch Parameters

I am trying to build a function that detects duplicates. To try and figure out how to add parameters which take no input I Googled up this post:http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/tips/archive/2009/06/26/using-switch-parameters.aspxSo, to use this in my own function, I added these definitions (snippet shown purely for demo purposes):function Find-Duplicates{param([string]$filePath,[switch]$recurse)# Test filePath for proper syntaxif(!$filePath.EndsWith("\"){$filePath = $filePath + "\"}# Create command for invoking search. This can be dynamically added to before invocation to avoid a bunch of if/then and switch conditions in the code.$command = Get-ChildItem -Path $filePath# Add Date recurse switchif($recurse){$command = $command + " -recurse"}# Run actual searchInvoke-Command $command}When...

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Powershell - Fillters in Functions

I am working with a function that needs a specific set of subprocesses run. I tried adding a nested function, but, Powershell didn't seem to take to that idea too well. Instead, I added a filter for checking MD5 hashes to my function. I got the MD5 snippet from Vadims Podams post:http://www.vistax64.com/powershell/207882-get-md5-digest-powershell.htmlwhich gave me:function Hash-MD5 ($file) {$hasher = [System.Security.Cryptography.MD5]::Create()$inputStream = New-Object System.IO.StreamReader ($file)$hashBytes = $hasher.ComputeHash($inputStream.BaseStream)$inputStream.Close()$builder = New-Object System.Text.StringBuilder$hashBytes | Foreach-Object { [void] $builder.Append($_.ToString("X2")) }$output = New-Object PsObject$output | Add-Member NoteProperty HashValue ([string]$builder.ToString())$output.hashvalue}Modifying...

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Powershell - Find Empty Folders in Directory Tree

I didn't create a whole lot here. I just used a Scripting Guys post and modified my search path. Here's the link:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730953.aspxTo get what I need I jump across a large set of folder trees:dir \\192.168.0.2\a$\root\subname\*\storage | Where-Object {$_.PSIsContainer -eq $True} | Where-Object {$_.GetDirectories().Count -eq 0} | Select-Object FullNameThis outputs a list of folders with no folders in them. If I wanted to tweak this to find folders without files, I wold use this pattern:dir \\192.168.0.2\a$\root\subname\*\storage | Where-Object {$_.PSIsContainer -eq $True} | Where-Object {$_.GetFiles().Count -eq 0} | Select-Object FullNameThis way I don't have to research this again. Now, I can just go back to my blog for posterity's s...

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ASP.NET 4.0 - Referencing App_Code Classes

I am working to learn how to properly use custom code from within an ASP.NET project. I added an App_Code directory to an empty project. Within the App_Code directory I created a folder called DLL and a file called DLL.cs. Looking back, I would have done it differently. The path [ProjectName].App_Code.DLL is pre-pended to the file name, DLL, in this case. So, when I reference the object in my project, CachingTest, it is fully written as CachingTest.App_Code.DLL.DLL. The second DLL in the name makes it a little more confusing. What I would more likely do is name the .cs file after the Object I am working with instead of the Folder class. I figured out how to access the code from this link:http://quickstarts.asp.net/QuickStartv20/aspnet/doc/pages/code.aspxAs it notes, you do need to...

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ASP.NET 4.0 - Adding Typed DataSets

As with my post yesterday, I am working towards a real, enterprise-type application in terms of coding and file structure. After struggling with my approach based on the old ASP.NET article:http://www.asp.net/data-access/tutorials/creating-a-data-access-layer-csWhen I tried adding the data in this case I kept getting errors when trying to reference the object in the DataAdapter provided by the .xsd. I posted on the ASP.NET forums:http://forums.asp.net/t/1649988.aspxand sandy060583 pointed me towards this article:http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/sample_chapter/article.php/c13471Now, so far I have tried these steps:Create an App_Code folder.Right click the application folder and add a new DataSetWithin the DataSet Designer form I drag the table I want to type onto the form.Next, I have...

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Samsung RF510-S02 15.6-inch HD LED Laptop (Graphite Radiant Burst)

Samsung RF510, one of Samsung's new high-end consumer laptops. RF510, particularly has a beautiful industrial design, with Intel Core i7-720 processor, 4GB RAM, 640GB 7200rpm drive split into two partitions, NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics, and a standard 1366 x 768 display HD LED 15.6-inch display. It also features HDMI and a chargeable USB 3.0 port, meaning that you can charge a Zune, phone, or just about any other USB-compatible device even when the PC is off. The RF510 is a prime example of that; thoughtful industrial design, great specs, and a reasonable price make it an excellent choice for anyone looking for a power 15" laptop. You...

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