I'm pleased to announce that my PowerShell for working with Azure’s public IP address listings now supports the new Azure Regions in France and Germany. This release, 0.9, introduces some minor breaking changes, needed to support the Germany regions.

Jan 31
Jan 31 Managing Windows Speculation Control Protections with PowerShell DSC

Kieran Jacobsen

Security, PowerShell

As part of their response to the Speculative Execution vulnerabilities, Spectre and Meltdown, Microsoft released updates for all supported systems. Microsoft made the decision to not enable these protections in Windows Server by default. It's up to you as the administrator to enable the protections.

Jan 25
Jan 25 Using Intune and AAD to protect against Spectre and Meltdown

Kieran Jacobsen

Azure, Security

I’m a big fan of Intune’s device compliance policies and Azure Active Directory’s (AAD) conditional access rules. They're one piece of the puzzle in moving to a [Beyond Corp][5] model, that I believe is the future of enterprise networks.

Jan 20
Jan 20 Posh-SYSLOG 3.2.1 has been released

Kieran Jacobsen

PowerShell

In early January, Ben Claussen reported that there was a date formatting issue in Posh-SYSLOG, I've released Posh-SYSLOG 3.2.1 to address these issues.

When I initially developed Posh-SYSLOG, I didn’t correctly follow RFC 3164. The timestamps sent had a leading zero for dates less than 10, but the RFC states this should be a leading space. I don’t know how much this impacted some users, and apologise for any issues.

Jan 12
Jan 12 Posh-SYSLOG 3.2 has been released

Kieran Jacobsen

PowerShell

Over the Christmas break, I had a few hours to spare and tackled a few issues in some of my PowerShell modules. I’ve released Posh-SYSLOG 3.2 as a resolve of this.

This version removes the need to call Get-NetAdapter that's contained in the NetTCPIP module. The reason why I wanted to remove this dependency is to allow Posh-SYSLOG to run on PowerShell 6 (at least on Windows to start with).

Jan 10
Jan 10 Updated: A Home User Guide to Spectre and Meltdown

Kieran Jacobsen

Security

Unless you have been living under a rock or in a case, you have probably heard of the CPU vulnerabilities: Meltdown and Spectre. There’s been quite a lot of media hype, you could be forgiven thinking that these are world-ending bugs. My opinion, and that of others is that this isn’t something to panic over.

Nov 25
Nov 25 Posh-SYSLOG version 3.1.1 has been released

Kieran Jacobsen

PowerShell

Just a quick note to announce that I've released an update for my Posh-SYSLOG module, version 3.1.1

The module fixes issues with PowerShell 4.0 support as reported by Cristiano Guadagnino and Brian Napolitano. As always, a huge round of thanks goes out to the pair for discovering the issue, pointing me in the right direction to fixing the issue and testing the fixes.

Nov 5
Nov 5 Levelling up your PowerShell modules with Plaster

Kieran Jacobsen

Between personal, community and team projects, I am involved in the maintenance of over 30 PowerShell modules. I have two recommendations to anyone starting with PowerShell, read the community style and formatting guidelines, and most importantly, standardise your work. I have developed a structure for all of my projects over the years, and now that I am performing more mentoring and code reviews I thought I would share some of my tips.