Password Expiry Reminder Email Alert

Passwords are an important part of any account or domain and regular password expiration makes any organization safe from attacks. However, password expiration increases the work for the helpdesk who has to reset the passwords for the users who forgot to change the password for their accounts before its expiry.

Today we are going to tell you ways using which you can send an automated email to the users whose passwords are near to expiry date so that they can change their passwords beforehand and avoid being in the password expired state.

You can schedule this script to run daily using Windows Task scheduler so that users are reminded until they change their passwords.

We just have to update the SMTP host's FQDN and the email from which you want to send the notification emails in the above script and it will send the email to the users based on the email address retrieved from the AD attribute.

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Move EC2 Instance to another AZ or Subnet

To reap the benefits of High Availability in EC2, it's advisable to deploy the instances in different AZ or Subnets. But what in case you already deployed the instance in the same AZ and then wanted a few of them to move to a different AZ.

AWS doesn't give you a direct way of moving the EC2 instances across AZs, but there are a series of steps that you need to follow to move or clone the EC2 instance to another AZ. 

Performing those steps takes a lot of time as these include copying the security groups, tags, creating AMI of the source EC2 instance, and then deploying the new EC2 in the different AZ using the AMI created and a lot more.

MagicPowershell comes up with a PowerShell script that moves the EC2 instance to the AZ you want. It asks for 3 inputs, instance name, region, and the AZ in which you want to move the instance, and performs the tedious-looking tasks for you.

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Azure VM Snapshot and Restore with Powershell

You all used to right-click a VM and take the snapshot before any activity so that you can revert back to that state in case the activity goes wrong. You may be in shock as this feature is not available in Azure VMs.

Don't get afraid as we are going to tell you a way to create and restore the Azure VM from the snapshot. Azure provides a way to take a snapshot of the disk but not the whole VM so restoring the VM becomes a difficult task.

For creating and reverting the snapshot you need to install the AzureVMSnapshots module by running the command Install-Module AzureVMSnapshots.

Once you have installed the module you can just run the below script which will ask you for the VM whose snapshot you want to take and creates the snapshot of the OS disk.

After taking the snapshot if at any point you want to revert the VM from the snapshot you took in the above step you can simply run the below PowerShell script which will prompt you if you really want to restore the VM. If yes it will power off the VM and replace the original source disk with the snapshot disk.

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