CertAuto

For a developer environment I had a few certificates that needed automatic renewal at certain intervals. The script below uses the PSPKI module to check if certificates are expiring on IIS-Site in X days and if so, renews the agains a local certification authority.
The PSPKI -module is really god for sending and approving certification requests  via Powershell when Microsofts own tools leaves room for improvement.

This is really only for a testenviroment and offline-enviroments.
Folder structure needs to created to look below




Certini contains the template for the certificate like below for example
 [Version]
Signature = "$Windows NT$"
[NewRequest]
Subject = "C=US,S=CA,L=OHIO,O=Fabrikam,OU=IT,CN=ajax.aspnetcdn.com"
Exportable = TRUE
KeyLength = 4096
KeySpec = 1
KeyUsage = 0xa0
MachineKeySet = True
ProviderName = "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider"
ProviderType = 12
Silent = True
SMIME = False
RequestType = PKCS10
FriendlyName = "ajax.aspnetcdn.com"



References:
https://www.sysadmins.lv/projects/pspki/default.aspx  - PSPKI Module

Export IIS bindings

I find the cmdlet for exporting cmdlets a bit lacking so I built my own export function for fun and profit.
The function in the toolsfile collects all info and return a populated object that can be used to export list to file or do something else with.

Digging through a lot of files

I have a scenario where I need to scan a lot of xmlfiles from elmah-logs in the size of 300 000 files.

Powershell was a fun project for this but couldn't really do the job due to performance issues.
When reading 300 000 files using powershell like example below, the script ran for 368 minutes.


I tried running parallell jobs and using dotnet to read files instead but nothing could complete with using MS Logparser.
So enter Log Parser Studio.
This neat tool managed to comb through 300 000 files in 47 minutes instead!
It is a bit tricky to formulate the queries however. Heres an example of getting elmah logs where a variable named HTTP_REFERER contains a key value

select * FROM '[LOGFILEPATH]' where  string like '%http://www.mycompany.com/subsite%' and name like 'HTTP_REFERER'

So in conclusion for same set of 300 000 files
Powershell took 368 minutes
Log Parser Studio took 47 minutes

References:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24659  - Log Parser 

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Log-Parser-Studio-cd458765

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2013/06/17/log-parser-studio-2-0-is-now-available/

Using hashtables to combine values

For a job I needed a good way of combining a primary value with optional subvalues in a xml-file.
Below is an example of how to extract attributes from a xmlelement into a hashtable and then join two hashtables into one. I couldn't find a method for extracting elements on the web, folks usually goes with subnodes instead of attributes. I'm partial to attributes and had to get creative, but the solution was quite simple. The Attributes from the element only show the actual elements from the xmlfile. Its not obvious when browsing the object that -name property can be lifted, but here it's used for creating a new hashtable-row



Samplescript for proof of concept


This eventually led to createwebsFromStructure.ps1 that uses powershell splatting to build commands with the resulting hashtable.

References:
https://powershell.org/2013/01/23/join-powershell-hash-tables/ - source for join-hashtable function
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg675931.aspx - source for details on splatting

Powershell and jobs

Powershell jobs are a bit of blunt instrument.

Here's two options for sending inputs for them
Scenario 1: Sending a string with all of our values and splitting them to an array when inside the scriptblock.


Scenario2: Sending an object as input. Handy for configs and saves the need to define variablenames.

powershell assisting with mails

ExtractAttachedMails.ps1 is used for extracted alla attached mails in a outlook .msg-file to specified folder.
CatalogueMails.ps1 is used for indexing the mails to more easily filter on timestamps and senders.

This came in handy when a happy user sent me 45 attached mails with the same subjectline so the extractionprocess also throws in an indexnumber to avoid namingconflicts.