I have to admit that before the Powershell Challenge, I wasn’t really looking forward to using Powershell for much of anything. It looked cumbersome, I didn’t always understand how sample scripts worked, and it was just easier to use the various other Windows tools to accomplish tasks.

However as I’ve been working through the Challenge, I’ve started to gain some comfort with the language, conventions, help, etc. This came into play recently as I was beginning to set up a new domain for some testing and demos.

I installed Server Core and went to configure a domain, which means static IP addresses and more. Once I had Core installed, with no domain and no other tools, I was slightly stuck. However I googled and when I found things like

Get-NetAdapter

and

Set-NetIPAddress

I wasn’t at all deterred. I could easily read and understand the way these commands work, how parameters are applied, how precedence matters with parens and piping works. Even a restart was quick with

Restart-computer

or

stop-computer

When I needed to verify which machine I was actually working on

$env:computername

was a quick way that worked well.

The whole world of Powershell starts to look easier as I go along. The slow movement through the book has made me more likely to run a quick search and type a command than use the GUI for a number of server-level tasks that I’ve needed to do.

It’s a neat new world for me.

Filed under: Blog Tagged: powershell, syndicated