In the previous post on ICMP, Ping, and Traceroute I discussed a method of detecting hosts on a network when the firewall may be set to block ICMP Echo Requests. The solution to this was to use ARP, even if a host firewall is set to block all IP based traffic, ARP is a layer…

I wanted to write a post and do a bit of a deepdive into ICMP, ping and traceroute. I’ve found that having a good networking foundation has been a tremendous help in my day to day work. So if you’ve ever used ping or traceroute, and wanted to know a little more, read on. I’m not…

I’ve been making frequent changes to my PowerShell profiles and I’m finding it difficult to keep them synchronized across various systems - home PC, home laptop, various lab VMs, some of which are local, some not. I looked online to see what others were doing and most of what I…

Shortened URLs are generated by services such as Bitly or TinyURL, and they take a long address, for example , and turn it into something like . These are legitimate services as some URLs can be truly horrific (I’m looking at you, IBM SSIC), but they are also often abused to…

For years I’ve seen blog posts, scripts, forum messages, you name it - all referencing the WMI class when someone is looking for a way to list installed applications on a Windows system. This method seems to be exceptionally prevalent and can be dangerous. Let’s find out why…

The default title for a PowerShell window is simply ‘Windows PowerShell’, and this is fine, but customising it can make things a little more convenient. The Problem If you’re anything like me you typically have between 3 and 33 PowerShell windows open, and this is a regular…

I’m undertaking a project where one of of the tasks involves processing some 350,000 XML files. If each file takes one second to process that’s just over 4 days, which is not a particularly appealing length of time. I’ve been working on improving performance by implementing…

A few people have asked if it was possible to run PSKindleWatch as a Windows service. This is a guide on how to accomplish that using NSSM. To be clear, this method can be used to run any PowerShell script as a Windows service, but we’ll use PSKindleWatch an an example. The…