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Tag: Scripts

Azure update management schedules using PowerShell

Using Azure update management (AUM) you can schedule the updates for your Azure VMs and report on compliance. AUM is an Azure automation account feature. Obviously you can manually create each schedule but that is time consuming and…well manual. This is where PowerShell comes in. If you don’t have the PowerShell Az module already installed then you can follow this Microsoft document: Install Azure PowerShell The first job is to connect or login to your…

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Azure delete VM and child resources using PowerShell

In Azure delete VM is an easy task. Just go to the VM and click “Delete” on the menu. The issue is that only deletes the Virtual Machine resource, it does not delete the dependant child resources such as disk and network interface. Obviously you can manually delete each child resource but that is time consuming and…well manual. This is where PowerShell comes in. If you don’t have the PowerShell Az module already installed then…

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Azure resource tagging using PowerShell

Azure resource tagging is a great way to label or group your Azure resources based on custom names and values. For example you could have a tag named “owner” for specifying the resource owner or “patchphase” for noting what phase to patch the OS or application running on a virtual machine. The issue with Azure resource tagging is the management of the tags when you have more than a handful of resources, so pretty much…

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VM generated password for local admin user

This post explains how to use a vRA Software Component in vRA to implement a generated VM password (local user within Guest OS) and then display it to the user as part of a VM request. Firstly, create a Software Component or edit an existing one. Add a “Computed” property named “LocalAdminPassword” (or whatever name you prefer). Enter the relevant below code (Bash for Linux or PowerShell for Windows) in the “Configure” life cycle action.…

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Using jq in Bash to manage JSON content

No doubt you already use Bash for a wide range of tasks, consequently are already aware it’s purely a procedural scripting language and not object oriented? For the majority of tasks this is fine, however there are times when objects are useful; enter jq, a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. This post explains how to use jq to convert data into JSON and therefore an object. Say you have a file in /root/ with…

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Create a PowerShell Object from contents of a file

No doubt you already use PowerShell for a wide range of tasks and consequently are already familiar working with PowerShell objects? This post explains how to turn the contents of a file into a PowerShell object. You can then use this object for whatever you need. Say you have a file in C:\data\ with the content: hostname=file-server-1 os=Windows 2012R2 location=Digbeth city=Birmingham installed=01-06-2015 active=yes Now you create a PowerShell function that will take the above content…

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SSH User and Key Management

Managing users and more importantly SSH keys across numerous Linux systems can be the bane of any sysadmin’s life. There are tools out there which make this easier, however some don’t work very well, some are complicated and others are costly. All of them tend to require additional software installing and being configured. Essentially there is a simple solution, have the user’s SSH public keys stored in a remote location and have a script which…

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