PowerShell Code Repository

This script is a proof of concept. Further work needs to be done. It requires the user to enter a valid username and password for a gmail.com account. It then attempts to form an SSL connection with the server, and, retrieve the first email. Unfortunately it returns random results. Perhaps someone can improve upon it with some more sockets knowledge than I have.

Add entries to the Windows hosts file. The function checks first to see if the entry exists in the file. If the entry does not exist, the function adds the entry and verifies it was added. Please feel free to add improvements. The function Utility.Time-Stamp is another helper function I use to denote the current Time. It can be found here: http://poshcode.org/2795.

Logging function for Powershell v2. Needed to address current Powershell logging limitations. See a discussion about said limitations here: http://jdhitsolutions.com/blog/2011/03/powershell-automatic-logging/#comment-2899 .

Logs to file and prints messages to the console and optionally logs to the system event logs. Note – admin rights are required when specifying the EventLogName parameter because the SourceExists method requires admin rights because it checks rights on the Security log. This limitation seems silly to me and if you think so as well get Microsoft to fix it by voting here: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/293617/eventlog-sourceexists-always-fails-for-non-administrators#tabs .

Feel free to add features as necessary.

Will Steele: I suggest adding the Encoding switch to the Out-File calls (lines 58 and 60) to ensure the file didn’t clog up the output file. I also added a parameter, $LogEncoding, (lines 37-38) to allow for Encoding selection. The default is ASCII.

It might be worth adding a few lines that allow for folder creation using the input file parameter. For instance, if the folder path referenced in the -Path parameter is invalid it doesn’t handle this. Example:

dir | Write-Log -Path C:\test\test\test.txt
Contacts
Failed to create log entry in: ‘C:\test\test\test.txt’. The error was: ‘Could not find a part of the path ‘C:\test\test\test.txt’.’.
At line:86 char:9
+ throw <<<< “Failed to create log entry in: ‘$Path’. The error was: ‘$_’.” + CategoryInfo : OperationStopped: (Failed to creat…st\test.txt’.’.:String) [], RuntimeException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Failed to create log entry in: ‘C:\test\test\test.txt’. The error was: ‘Could not find a part of the path ‘C:\test\test\test.txt’.’.