Using PS to Add a Key to the Registry

In a recent experiment, I had to disable User Account Control (UAC) on a remote Virtual Machine through WinRM.

Note

To better protect those users who are members of the local Administrators group, we implemented UAC restrictions on the network. This mechanism helps prevent against “loopback” attacks. This mechanism also helps prevent local malicious software from running remotely with administrative rights.

Whenever I deal with the registry, I always feel like the guy in the picture above. You never know if you’re going to regret making changes…

Anyway, this was an experiment, so please, use this wisely.

$registryPath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System"
$Name = "LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy"
$value = "1"

New-ItemProperty -Path $registryPath `
                 -Name $name `
                 -Value $value `
                 -PropertyType DWORD `
                 -Force | Out-Null

# Restart the VM to apply the changes
Restart-Computer -Force

Unzip a file in PowerShell

Automating configurations on remote machines can sometimes make simple things interesting. In this specific scenario, I needed to use WinRm to Upload a file to a Virtual Machine (VM) on Microsoft Azure. Then I needed to unzip the file and finally go ahead with the configuration of the said software.

Searching the web gave me an appreciable amount of creative ways to go about unzipping files. This was by far the simplest approach I found. Keep in mind that it requires .NET 4.5.

$sourceFile = 'C:\assets\Microsoft.Azure.ServiceFabric.WindowsServer.5.3.204.9494.zip'
$targetFolder = 'C:\Microsoft.Azure.ServiceFabric.WindowsServer'

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('System.IO.Compression.FileSystem')
[System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::ExtractToDirectory($sourceFile, $targetFolder)

Deploying Nano Server to Azure

Based on the current builds, compared to Server, Nano Server has 93 percent lower VHD size, 92 percent fewer critical bulletins and 80 percent fewer reboots!

I’ve been curious about Nano Server for a while now. And I recently noticed that it was available on Microsoft Azure. This post is definitely from a developers point-of-view. It goes through the steps required to create a functional Nano Server Virtual Machines (VM) on Microsoft Azure.

Nano Server is ideal for many scenarios:

• As a “compute” host for Hyper-V virtual machines, either in clusters or not
• As a storage host for Scale-Out File Server.
• As a DNS server
• As a web server running Internet Information Services (IIS)
• As a host for applications that are developed using cloud application patterns and run in a container or virtual machine guest operating system.

The Adventure

Nano Server is a remotely administered server operating system (OS). Wait. Let me repeat this because it’s important… Nano Server is a remotely administered server operating system (OS). Developers, Nano Server is a server OS optimized for clouds and data centers. It’s designed to take up far less disk space, to setup significantly faster, and to require far fewer restarts than Windows Server. So why does this matter? Well it means more resources, more availability and stability for our Apps. And it also means that it’s time to learn new skills, because there is no local logon capability at all, nor does it support Terminal Services. However, we have a wide variety of options for managing Nano Server remotely, including Windows PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Windows Remote Management, and Emergency Management Services (EMS).

Using Remote PowerShell on Azure

When we have hundreds of Virtual Machines to manage, manual tasks just don’t cut it. they’re error prone and can be quite boring to carry out.

On Azure, there are two approaches to automation for Windows Virtual Machines. The first is PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC). This approach is well suited for the initial configuration of complex environments. The second is Remote PowerShell, and this blog post will focus on this approach.