Christos Polydorou

PowerShell PSCredential objects are probably the best way to use credentials within PowerShell and protect the password. There's a catch however when it comes to the need to have the password saved in the object in plain text format in order to use it where the object is not acceptable as input. Take for example a connection to a SQL server where a connection string is required. Below is the way to extract the password. We'll start of by creating a PSCredential object to use as example: PS C:\> $cred = Get-Credential PS C:\Users\cpolydorou> $cred UserName Password -------- -------- testuser System.Security.SecureString As you may see on the output of the command, the "Password" property is an object of type SecureString. Fortunatelly, the PSCredential object has a method that can provide the plain text value of the password. By using the GetNetworkCredential method, we have access to the username and passw...

Today's topic: Active Directory and Password Expiration! Not being able to login due to an expired password is a very common scenario for Active Directory user administration. If the password for a user is not set to never expire, then a group policy will most definitely make it expire after a period of time since the last change. Our goal for today? We are going to create a report that will contain the setting for the expiration of the password, the time it was last set and the time since the change. To get that information we are going to use Powershell and the ActiveDirectory module. All it takes is a singe Get-ADUser command to get the information from Active Directory piped to a Select-Object command in order to form the output: Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties passwordlastset, ` passwordneverexpires | Select-Object Name, ` SamAccountName, ` PasswordNeverExpires, ` PasswordL...