PowerShell

When deploying Microsoft Office 2021, one of the key considerations is how to handle older, existing versions like Office 2010. By default, the modern Office installer will automatically remove these older versions, but for automated or customized deployments, you need more control. This guide will walk you through using the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) to create a silent, automated installation of Office 2021 that also cleanly removes any older Office versions. ...

If you’ve ever tried to activate Microsoft Office in a corporate or restricted network environment, you may have encountered frustrating activation failures. Even with a valid license, Office activation can fail if it cannot communicate with Microsoft’s activation servers. This is almost always due to a firewall blocking the necessary outbound traffic. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the required domains and ports for Office activation and offers ready-to-use scripts to configure various firewalls, including Windows Firewall, Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, pfSense, and Linux iptables. ...

In a secure or air-gapped environment, you can’t use Install-Module to download modules directly from the PowerShell Gallery. However, you can use an online machine to download the module and its dependencies, transfer them to the offline machine, and install them manually. This guide will walk you through the process using the popular Posh-SSH module as an example, but the steps can be applied to any module from the PowerShell Gallery. ...

When diagnosing network connectivity issues, one of the most fundamental steps is to determine if a specific TCP port is open and listening on a remote host. A closed, blocked, or unresponsive port is often the root cause of application failures, and knowing how to test it is a critical skill for any IT professional. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the most common and reliable methods to test port connectivity on Windows, from modern PowerShell cmdlets to classic command-line tools. ...

Creating a full, bootable backup of a USB drive as an .iso or .img file is a critical task for IT professionals and tech enthusiasts. Whether you’re archiving a custom Windows installer, preserving a Linux live environment, or creating deployment images, a sector-by-sector clone ensures that the bootloader, partition table, and all data are perfectly preserved. This guide provides three reliable methods to clone a bootable USB drive, catering to different user preferences: the command-line power of PowerShell with WSL, the simplicity of a GUI tool on Windows, and the classic dd command on Linux. ...

If you’ve ever downloaded a script, installer, or even a help file from the internet, you’ve likely encountered a frustrating Windows security feature: the file is “blocked,” preventing it from running or displaying correctly. This is due to the “Mark of the Web,” a security mechanism designed to protect you from potentially malicious content. PowerShell provides a simple and elegant solution to this problem: the Unblock-File cmdlet. This guide will explain what the Mark of the Web is, how to identify blocked files, and how to use Unblock-File to safely manage them. ...

For system administrators, creating a standardized desktop environment often involves customizing the Windows taskbar. While pinning items is easy for a user, automating the process of listing or unpinning applications can be surprisingly difficult. Windows intentionally does not provide a simple, built-in command to manage pinned items to prevent applications from pinning themselves without user consent. However, with a bit of PowerShell scripting, you can gain control over the taskbar. This guide will walk you through the most effective methods to list, unpin, and manage taskbar items programmatically. ...

In a modern Linux environment, it’s increasingly common to find both PowerShell (pwsh) and Bash installed on the same system. This provides a unique opportunity for system administrators and developers to leverage the strengths of both shells. You can use Bash for its powerful text-processing utilities and then pipe the results to PowerShell for its object-oriented data manipulation, or vice versa. This guide will walk you through the techniques for calling Bash from PowerShell and PowerShell from Bash, enabling you to create powerful, cross-shell automation scripts. ...

PowerShell Remoting is a powerful feature that allows you to run commands on remote computers. While it traditionally used WinRM on Windows, modern PowerShell (pwsh) can now use SSH as its transport layer. This is a game-changer, as it provides a single, secure, and universal protocol to manage your entire fleet of servers, whether they are running Windows or Linux. This guide will walk you through setting up and using PowerShell SSH remoting, from basic commands to a real-world example of deploying an application to multiple servers at once. ...

One of PowerShell’s most powerful and defining features is that it is built directly on the .NET runtime. This isn’t just a superficial connection; PowerShell’s engine, its cmdlets, and the data that flows through its pipeline are all .NET objects. This deep integration gives PowerShell a “superpower”: the ability to directly and seamlessly access the vast ecosystem of .NET classes and methods. This guide will walk you through how this relationship works and how you can leverage .NET to write incredibly powerful and flexible scripts, turning PowerShell into a full-fledged .NET scripting language. ...