How do you talk to security? While at NDC Melbourne, Richard chatted with Sarah Young about her approaches to helping folks work with the security team. Often seen as an impediment to business, Sarah talks about what motivates security teams, how to use language to help them understand that you are taking security seriously, and how to get more things done! Ultimately, the DevOps mantra of providing value to the customer still works - working with people to improve the processes that lead to secure systems helps everyone!

Links

• Daniel Pink's Drive
• Managed Identities for Azure
• Tenerife Airport Disaster

Recorded April 30, 2025

What's new in PowerShell 7.5? Richard talks to Jason Helmick about the latest version of PowerShell. Jason talks about 7.5 being a version with plenty of community contributions and what that means for everyone. He also discusses 7.6, which will be released as a long-term support version of PowerShell synchronized with .NET 10. Then, on to Desired State Configuration 3.0.0, which makes DSC work effectively across platforms, with or without PowerShell itself! 7.5 is a great version - are you up to date?

Links

• PowerShell 7.5
• PowerShell on GitHub
• Desired State Configuration 3.0.0
• WinGet Configuration
• System Configuration Tools in Windows

Recorded April 4, 2025

Active Directory is 25 years old - are you still managing it like it's 1999? Richard talks to Liz Tesch about her excellent blog post on the subject and the challenge many sysadmins have with Active Directory today. Liz talks about how WAN bandwidth was a concern in the early 2000s, so we organized Active Directory into Organizational Units to minimize the amount of AD traffic over the WAN - today, that is irrelevant. The challenge today is ensuring AD is not a vector for blackhats to attack the organization. Raising your functional level and utilizing some great free tools (check the links in the show notes) are all you need to use Active Directory like it's 2025!

Links

• Active Directory is 25 Years Old. Do you still manage it like it's 1999?
• mimikatz
• Windows Local Administrator Password Solution
• Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management
• Kara Lawson - Handle Hard Better
• Endpoint Detection and Response

Recorded April 4, 2025