So the past few days I’ve been poking around in the Youtube channel “At&t Tech Channel”. Within that is the “At&t Archive” that hosts tons of old videos from At&t, Bell Labs and MA Bell. These videos are awesome for a variety of reasons; but other than the retro-futurism of them, it shows just how much MA Bell either “thought” or “was” the technology provider of the people back then. (At least until the Carterfone Decision)
It’s really interesting to see the concept videos showing paging for farms, how the “central office” was obsolete and going away, leading to *gasp* DIALING (and later push-button dialing), amongst other things.
It’s also interesting how a handful of these videos are somewhat local to the PA/NJ area, as the NJ Bell labs building was a substantial part of them back then, and (if I’m not mistaken) where a number of major innovations, including the invention of the transistor happened.
If you’re nerdy like me and need a new time waster, definitely check out this channel!
Figured I would share this tip, as it’s so simple (and really shouldn’t happen), but it does and drives me nuts every time.
The Windows 10 Media Creation Tool downloads a Windows 10 install, and let’s you create an ISO or bootable USB stick to install Windows 10 into a computer. I don’t generally use it much in an IT realm as we use the corporate installer tools, however when working on a home computer or re-gearing an old laptop for home use for someone, I use this to quickly get Windows 10 installed.
As always, there’s a catch. I pop in a USB stick, open the tool, select “Create installation media”, and it will show the E drive or whatever drive my USB stick is. Great! Hit go and it spends some time downloading Windows 10 and starts working on creating the stick.
Then it fails.
Ok maybe it was a fluke…do it all again, wait another 15 minutes, it fails again. ARRG! It usually comes up with some cryptic error that sounds like a media/disk error, in addition the USB stick usually now is corrupted and you have to re-format the stick. What is going on with this??
Turns out the answer is an easy one, and really, it shouldn’t even happen. Once you click “Create Installation media” – it brings up a screen with your USB drive showing, for example E:\. For all intents and purposes it looks like its already good to go. Thing is…you haven’t PICKED that drive yet! Even though it looks like that’s where it’s pointing to, and yes it seems to access the stick, you have to actually click on the drive letter before clicking Next.
While away on vacation last week, I did something that I thought initially to be a lot more difficult than it really is – I tuned in the International Space Station (ISS) and received SSTV images from it! If you didn’t know, the ISS has a ham radio onboard and transmits on the 2 meter band (145.800 specifically), and depending on the situation you may even be able to talk up to it.
As I’m trying to clean up some accounts, I found that it’s -not easy- to simply get a list of all the groups a user is a member of in powershell, at least not like the one that displays in the admin portal. In doing some hunting (admittedly, not a lot of hunting) I came across this site that has just about what I was looking for, but I will warn you that the one-liners provided are not efficient – they have to populate the members of all groups, therefore if you have a LARGE directory, these may take a very long time to run, and be data-intensive. If you’re an SMB or SME with only a couple hundred users, they should be OK.
The problem was, it didn’t work! It looked good, but the variable it stored the results in was empty. After a quick review I realized the problem; the $mailbox.Alias at the end of the scripts should have been $mailbox.Name, since the alias will never match the name shown in the group membership. Once I changed that, it worked as it should:
$Office365GroupsMember = Get-UnifiedGroup | where { (Get-UnifiedGroupLinks $_.Alias -LinkType Members | foreach {$_.name}) -contains $mailbox.Name}
However…this only works for “Office365” Groups, and not all Office365 group types, that may include groups sync’ed from Active Directory/DirSync, like distribution lists and so on. I took the one-liner from that site, and modified it slightly to use “get-msolgroup” rather than get-unifiedgroup, which worked as it should.
From there you can pipe the output of that command into others, like remove-msolgroupmembership (although it needs the member objectid which is odd), or store it in a variable. Keep in mind you may want to filter group types as well, as I’m not sure you can remove a user from an Office365 group that was added/created as part of a Teams teams.
