Month: July 2018

Powershell oneliner to check network connections used on current machine based on Mike Robin’s blog post

Mike Robins had a nice tip yesterday about using powershell to see what your system is talking to and I thought I would tweak it slightly to potentially make it even more useful.

When I ran the command on my machine it took a while to run and I also thought it would be nice to tweak it so that the machine does a reverse dns lookup to retrieve the host names that the system is talking to. This might provide an indication of whether the connection is good or not.

I saved the output of the command to a variable so if I need to tweak the display output I can do so easily without running the script again.

$a=Get-NetTCPConnection -State Established | `
Select-Object -Property LocalPort, RemoteAddress, RemotePort, State,`
@{name='Process';expression={(Get-Process -Id $_.OwningProcess).Name}}, `
@{name='fqdn';expression={([System.Net.Dns]::GetHostByAddress($_.Remoteaddress).Hostname)}},`
 CreationTime
$a

This is a very quick and dirty hack and takes ages to run on my computer. It probably doesn’t help that I have a ton of chrome tabs open which will require a lot of dns lookups and several of them are the same host but this method will lookup them all up individually. IP  and dns lookup on active network connections

 

Yes, I split this ‘one-liner’ into multiple lines to make it easier to read on the screen but if you have to do that, then it’s not really a one-liner and even more so if you are unlikely to remember it.

Office365 Exchange Control Panel now has command logging for admins.

Help Button, Show command logging.One of my annoyances with Office365 administration tasks was that I could make changes to the interface but had no idea what commands were being run behind the scenes. This made creating scripts a frustrating trial and error attempt at finding the correct verbs to run.
However, this morning I stumbled under the Help/Show Command Logging option in the admin panel. This is similar to the Show command output that was available in the Exchange 2010 admin console that I used extensively in the good old on-premise days.

I have no idea how long this has been here but it really made my day.

Now if only the rest of the Office365 admin panels had the same functionality.