If you need to identify your public IP and have no possibility to run web browser of any kind you can use telnet.

In order to identify public IPv4:

telnet v4address.com

In order to identify public IPv6:

telnet v6address.com

Once connection is established autoresponder will show your public IP address:

This is the telnet autoresponder at v6address.com.
You have connected over IPv4.
Your IP address is 5.10.15.20

This might be helpful when using console on some *NIX systems or on the routers.

Handy quick one to change script execution policy for PowerShell:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Force

Now all scripts should work fine 🙂

In order to create new Forest and promote Windows Server 2012 Core to be Domain Controller for that Forest, first Active Directory Services Role has to be added:

Install-WindowsFeature AD-Domain-Services –IncludeManagementTools

Once Active Directory DOmain Services role is installed we can promote server to be first Domain Controller in the Forest.

Install-ADDSForest -DomainName "lab.corp" -DomainNetbiosName "LAB" -DomainMode Win2008R2 -ForestMode Win2008R2 -InstallDns -Force

And after some time new Forest and Domain Controller is ready to use.

To download file from URL I used following piece of code:

$fileURL = "http://server/file.zip"
$fileName = "C:\Downloads\file.zip"
$webclient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$webclient.DownloadFile($fileURL,$fileName)

Recently I needed to unzip file from PowerShell script. Here is result what I did use to achieve that:

$archiveDir = "C:\Downloads"
$fileZip = $archiveDir + "\file.zip"
$shell=new-object -com shell.application
$zip = $shell.NameSpace($fileZip)
foreach ($item in $zip.items())
{
 $shell.NameSpace($archiveDir).CopyHere($item)
}

After installing Windows Hyper-V 2012 sometimes there might be some issues with remote management (even if enabled via sconfig).

In that case few firewall rules might have to be enabled on Hyper-V machine using PowerShell:

(more…)