How to Upgrade PowerShell 7 to latest version

Have you opened a Windows Terminal and seen a highlighted message stating “A new PowerShell stable release is available …“?

powershell 7 upgrade prompt

Well you could go to the link provided in the prompt, download the upgrade and then run it on your machine, or you can quickly and easily upgrade PowerShell 7 directly from the terminal by typing the following command.

Invoke-Expression "& { $(Invoke-Restmethod https://aka.ms/Install-PowerShell.ps1) } -UseMSI"

This will automatically download and run the latest version of PowerShell 7 and run the installer for you. See quick and easy!

AWS Systems Manager

Using AWS Systems Manager to regain access to an EC2 machine

The other last night I received a call from a co-worker who added a Windows firewall rule to a production AWS EC2 machine running Server 2016. Soon after he couldn’t access the server via RDP nor were any of the IIS sites loading.

Of course a snapshot was not created prior to the change, because “It worked in Test”.

At first I thought we might be up a creek and restoring from an older backup. But, then I remembered AWS Systems Manager and the ability to send commands to an AWS EC2 machine via the AWS console.

Below are the quick steps I took to disable the Windows Firewall using AWS Systems Manager to regain access into the EC2 machine.

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