Ever wanted pull up the password for a WiFi network your computer remembers but you don’t? If you’re anything like me, the computer remembers far more than I do. Luckily, Windows not only stores these keys in plaintext, but some of them can even be retrieved without administrator access! (Is that good? I think it is but something tells me it might not be…) And of course, let’s go one step further and make a neat little script to pull out all of these keys and present them in a convenient way.

No, I would not like to say hello, Cortana. Nothing is as monotonous, boring, and brain-numbingly automatable as installing Windows, installing applications, joining a domain, and clicking all the right boxes in all the right places. And it’s even worse in the latest versions of Windows 10, where we’re greeted by the condescending robot voice of Halo’s deceptive antagonist artificial intelligence during the OOBE setup phase. I’ve taken a particular liking to MDT, Microsoft’s solution to the absolute eye-glazing snorefest of configuring a new workstation or server.

Deploying MSI installers with group policy is super neat and super handy…. Most of the time. Sometimes, though, you need a bit more than just the default options when pushing out packages, and for those of us that don’t have a wheelbarrow full of money to burn on System Center there are two ways to do this: Use a GP Preference Item to distribute a configuration file to managed systems Create a transform set to apply to the MSI installer file While the first approach at first seems more straightforward, it does lead to the inevitable “GPO Spaghetti” once packages are added and removed.

Preface: Don’t do this on prod gear. This is a bad idea! I’ve long been a fan of automated deployment. During the fourth semester technical project at Fanshawe, I had a wonderful domain tree with OUs and global groups, group policies and delegated permissions. It was truly a nice domain. It just…. Felt a little lonely. Enter PowerShell. Using a fairly simple script, I was able to cozy up the domains with the right users in the right places.

Cisco IOS. It’s fun to configure, isn’t it? No? In an effort to learn Python scripting, I decided to take a bit of the monotony of managing and updating IOS config files away and replace it with the monotony of managing and updating spreadsheets! The real goal with this project was to design a ‘gitops’ system for periodically checking configs against baselines and build a stripped down orchestration platform. This turned out to be a little ambitious, but I’m fairly happy with the results regardless.