As part of some automated deployment work for ESXi I was assisting a colleague with, they had hit an issue with an out of the box deployment of ESXi beginning with a blank password for the root account.
The automation tool of choice Ansible was using an SSH connection to ESXi to make the initial configuration and was blocked at the first step since it was unable to connect because the fresh ESXi install had no password set.
PSDay.UK 2019 takes place on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners. In this short series of posts, I’m going to highlight the three session tracks from which you can pick during the day.
https://psday.uk/
In this post, we’ll look at Track 3.
https://twitter.com/cj_berlin
https://twitter.com/rsiddaway
PSDay.UK 2019 takes place on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners. In this short series of posts, I’m going to highlight the three session tracks from which you can pick during the day.
https://psday.uk/
In this post, we’ll look at Track 2.
https://twitter.com/chri_tea
https://twitter.com/cbergmeister
PSDay.UK 2019 takes place on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners. In this short series of posts, I’m going to highlight the three session tracks from which you can pick during the day.
https://psday.uk/
In this post, we’ll look at Track 1.
https://twitter.com/jamesoneill
https://twitter.com/nohwnd
Ansible has modules shell, for executing commands against Linux targets, and win_shell for executing commands against Windows targets - typically using PowerShell. So I was curious to see if it was possible to execute commands in a Linux target using PowerShell Core and if so, how to do it.
For my test I have an Ubuntu 18.04 VM with PowerShell 7.3.5 installed:
The shell module has an executable parameter described as “Change the shell used to execute the command.
This topic was not initially obvious to me, so hopefully it will help someone out reading this. Consider the scenario where you have an Ansible playbook which executes some PowerShell code via win_shell and you wish to consume the PowerShell output later on in the playbook.
The output from win_shell is available in the return value stdout (The command standard output ) or stdout_lines (The command standard output split in lines ).
As part of a large configuration script for Windows, and executed via Ansible, one step was to remove SMB1.
The official Microsoft Guidance on removing SMB1 states to use Disable-WindowsFeature - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2696547/detect-enable-disable-smbv1-smbv2-smbv3-in-windows-and-windows-server
I didn’t think too much more of this and simply added the step to the configuration script. However, upon executing it from Ansible I received the following error:
This got me questioning why is the recommendation to use Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature when the detect method is Get-WindowsFeature?
While working on a scenario where I needed to automate the installation of SCVMM 2019, firstly via PowerShell scripts and then those scripts plugged into an Ansible playbook, I encountered some failures during the Ansible execution of the PowerShell scripts. These same scripts had worked fine when run locally on the Windows 2016 Server designated to run SCVMM.
The PowerShell scripts automated the install of three components; SQL, ADK and SCVMM.
Following on from the highly successful 1 day PowerShell conference events run in 2017 and 2018 this year we are heading out of London and up to the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. See full details below:
https://psday.uk/
We’re SO excited to announce the final date and location of PSDay.UK 2019.
Please join us this year on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners.
On Wednesday 10th October 2018 a group of people involved with organising PowerShell User Group events around the UK will be hosting a 1 day PowerShell conference at CodeNode in London, PSDayUK. This follows on from the highly successful event run last year.
Updated 3rd August 2018:
An agenda will be published soon, once the session submissions have been reviewed. If you are interested in presenting then please fill out this form and your submission will be included in the review process.