Virtually Jason

I just read a cool article about parsing netstat output (aka unformatted string output) into PowerShell objects.  The solution was great (and their approach taught me that select-object has a -skip # parameter that can be used to chop off the first # of objects from an array, which is super useful), but since I would approach it in a totally different manner, I figured that I'd write out my technique!  I want to be clear: I'm not saying that one approach is better than the other.  There are often many perfectly valid solutions to a scripting problem.  In some situations, one might be preferable to another though, and so here's another option to add to the old toolbelt. (netstat -an | ? {$_ -match '^  '}).trim() -replace '  +',';' | ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter ';' That's a pretty dense line (and it's worth noting that there are two adjacent space characters before the plus in the replace string and in the match string), so let's b...

One of my customers is converting into an NSX-based network design.  In order to facilitate this conversion, they need to understand the rules that exist on their Palo Alto firewall and then recreate those desired behaviors in the NSX microsegmentation.  Their challenge was that their Palo Alto had a fairly complex ruleset, one that no one wanted to try and recreate by hand in NSX.  I'm sure that you can see where this is going. Before we could create anything in NSX (via the ever-evolving PowerNSX module), we had to understand the configuration of the existing firewall.  When I asked about exporting the configuration, the networking team told me that they had two options: JSON or XML.  Not knowing what I was likely to get working, I asked for them both, then tried convertfrom-JSON  and import-clixml  on the provided files.  Neither worked, so I had to do some digging. After banging my head into a wall for a while, one of my coworkers gave me...