Christos Polydorou

Hello and welcome to an article on how to create your own Powershell DSC Pull Service. This is the fifth article of the series and things are starting to build our own DSC infrastructure.  To configure the DSC Pull Service we are going to need a windows server machine running at least Powershell v5 and a certifite. For the purpose of this post, I've created a dedicated machine and the certificate that I'm going to use is issued by my Active Directory Certificate Services. What would be the easiest way to create a Pull Service? DSC of course. We are going to push a DSC configuration to our machine that is going to convert it to a DSC Pull Service! First off, we're going to need that certificate installed in the Personal container of the machine. I prefer using my CA to issue certificates since it is trusted by all the domain member machines and for this one I've enrolled for a certificate based on the Web Server template: You can use any web server certificate as long as

Welcome to the fourth article of the Desired Configuration series! Today we're going to discuss more on the ways you can apply configurations to virtual machines and how to examine the LCM verbose output. Without further ado, let me present the two ways you can apply configurations: Push and Pull. Push The push method is the simplest, we just send the configuration to the node and from then on the node has to act accordingly. We just sit and watch. Let's go through the process of pushing a configuration to a node. I'm going to be using my domain controller machine as the management host to avoid touching the node at all. First we have to put together the configuration itself. Here we are going to use a configuration from one of the previous posts that installs the Web-Server role and copies a web page file. We'll confirm that the Web-Server role is not installed on the node using the Get-WindowsFeature cmdlet: Great, IIS is not installed. Now, the default LCM configura

Following my previous post on how to configure the LCM, we are now going to deep dive into configurations and how to author them. We'll start with a very simple configuration and work our way to a more complicated one. In the first article of the series we configured a server with the Web-Server windows feature using the below configuration: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Configuration WebApp001 { # Import the module that contains the resources we're using. Import-DscResource -ModuleName PsDesiredStateConfiguration # The Node statement specifies which targets this configuration will be applied to. Node 'localhost' { # The first resource block ensures that the Web-Server (IIS) feature is enabled. WindowsFeature WebServer { Ensure = "Present" Name = "Web-Server" } # The second resource block ensures that the website conten