At my job I tend to have quiet and busy periods, just like everyone else. At some times I even have very busy periods… like now. Because of that I tend to not have time or motivation to do any blogging, but that doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything productive. Because of that I thought “why not just share the work I’m creating?”. An idea was born….Then it hit me..

The ProblemA frequent issue on servers is when services that are supposed to start simply haven’t started. There’s a simple one-liner that can show you the services that meet these requirements for you: 1 Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter "Startmode = 'Auto' AND State = 'Stopped' AND ExitCode != 0" Want to directly start up these services? Not a problem! 1 Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter "Startmode = 'Auto' AND State = 'Stopped' AND ExitCode !

The next part in my Lab setup now that I’ve gotten network configured is to actually no longer touch my new Lab machine… While that might sound strange at first, the reason for this is simple. My Lab should be a headless server, stuffed in a cabinet somewhere with power and a network connection and I should be able to do ALL my management tasks remotely. This should be a simple task you’d say, but for the sake of clarity [and to learn this process better myself] I have decided to write down all the steps required to do this.

Since I’ve decided to get more serious about updating my skills and knowledge again [also why I started blogging], I thought about getting a proper lab setup. The goal is to have a small, portable but powerful Hyper-V based lab which I can carry along with me from home and to work if need be. Now I tend to have a test setup on my home machine and one on my work laptop, depending on what I need at that moment.

I’m loving the way Microsoft is currently pushing PowerShell as THE go-to tool required to manage all your solutions. I’m at a loss however at why they aren’t providing out of the box solutions so that you can manage all of your workstations/servers through PowerShell. Sure, you can head over to every machine and configure PowerShell using 1 Enable-PSRemoting However I can understand that people have better things to do with their time [I sure do!

Today I ran into an issue where I had to quickly import x amount of users into an empty trial tenant from Office 365 in order for to prepare the future mail migration. Because I'm trying to get everything running through PowerShell, I thought this would be a nice moment to document everything for future use and for other people to see how it's done [or give tips 😉 ] Getting user information from Active Directory First of all I had to get the current user information from Active Directory in a format that I can use in