Detecting the Administrative Context in PowerShell

I was writing a PowerShell script and it needed to know whether or not it was running in the administrative context. It’s a bit fiddly but here’s a short bit of PowerShell that sets a boolean variable for it: $currentIdentity = New-Object System.Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal([System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()) $adminContext = $currentIdentity.IsInRole([System.Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole]::Administrator) Run that and $adminContext will be True if the… Read More »

Copy/Pasteable Client Antivirus Exclusions

Here’s a quick block of text that can be used to copy and paste into the excluded file locations dialog of the Microsoft Endpoint Protection client, compiled using KB822158. It is suitable for Windows client machines of any version up to Windows 8.1 C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Datastore.edb; C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs\Res*.log; C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs\Res*.jrs; C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs\Edb.chk; C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\Logs\Tmp.edb; C:\Windows\Security\Database\*.edb; C:\Windows\Security\Database\*.sdb; C:\Windows\Security\Database\*.log; C:\Windows\Security\Database\*.chk; C:\Windows\Security\Database\*.jrs; C:\ProgramData\NTUser.pol; C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\Registry.pol;… Read More »

File extension for Windows Language Packs

For some reason I had a mental block and couldn’t seem to remember this, but instead of using dism to install language packs on Windows 7 or above, like this… dism /online /add-package /packagepath:<path to language pack .cab file> …you can also simply rename the .cab language pack file to have the .mlc file extension and double-click it.… Read More »