So you’re starting to get the hang of this PowerShell stuff and are able to pull off your own fancy tricks with the builtin cmdlets, but you need more! You want to be able to do things like create computer accounts, get VMware host information or turn on Cisco UCS and HP blades, cool stuff! Well, there is a way and that way is PowerShell modules.

PowerShell modules come in two types, script modules (.psm1 files) and binary dll files. Not long from now you will be creating your own modules but if you would like to get a head start on that I suggest the MSDN topic, it has everything you ever wanted to know on modules.

This is going to be a bit of a different “The Internet Fishing Trawler” post in that I’ve seen quite a few interesting looking Microsoft KBs crop up on their RSS feeds lately. So for this edition I’ll just be presenting each KB, you can have a bit of a look at any that may apply to your environment. Good luck!

• Unsupported Sysprep scenarios
• FIX: More than 1,000 rules in the NRPT causes no rules to be loaded into memory in Windows
• SCOM 2012 or SCOM 2007 R2 throws a “Heartbeat Failure” message and then goes into a greyed out state in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Data Deduplication garbage collection job does not work as expected in Windows Server 2012
• FIX: TCP connections that use ephemeral loopback addresses are dropped suddenly in Windows
• Data loss occurs when a Windows Server 2012-based computer that has the data deduplication feature enabled crashes
• Issues when a physical disk encounters an error in a Windows Server 2012-based environment
• Error message when you try to schedule a shadow copy task in Windows Server 2012
• Microsoft security advisory: Vulnerability in DirectAccess could allow security feature bypass

• John Herbert over at Lame Journal has an interesting post asking what network engineers will be doing in five years time. For all the worry about automation there will still be people pressing buttons, just fewer of them. This might be a problem if you view IT as a job and not a career.

• Chuck Hollis has a bit of background on VMware+OpenStack. I think it is all pretty cool and if you have a spare 45 minutes I’d really recommend doing the Project NEE (VMware HOL) OpenStack lab.

Contrary to popular belief, VMware does work well with OpenStack and the VOVA is proof of that partnership. Basically an OpenStack controller in a virtual appliance. This is something I’d really like to see VMware provide support for, but I guess they will have to port it to SLES.

• Ah management devices, the soft underbelly of your infrastructure. The good people over at Rapid7 have been doing some analysis of the IPMI implementation in SuperMicro servers and have found a few things. There will be some Metasploit modules released. While SuperMicro is the target here, if you watch your favourite hardware vendor’s announcements you will see this is something they all struggle with.

• There is a Microsoft Graphics Component vulnerability doing the rounds as of late. While it affects older software and versions of Windows, Lync 2010 and 2013 versions are affected on the client side.