I was looking for PowerShell solutions for generating a random password (in order to set the Administrator password on a Windows instance provisioned in OpenStack), and found several solutions using the GeneratePassword method of System.Web.Security.Membership (documentation here), along the lines of this:

Function New-RandomComplexPassword ($length=8)
{
    $Assembly = Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Web
    $password = [System.Web.Security.Membership]::GeneratePassword($length,2)
    return $password
}

While this works, I was unhappy with the generated passwords: they were difficult to type or transcribe because they make heavy use of punctuation. For example:

I’ve recently been exploring the world of Windows scripting, and I ran into a small problem: I was running a script at system startup, and the script was running before the network interface (which was using DHCP) was configured.

There are a number of common solutions proposed to this problem:

• Just wait for some period of time.

  This can work but it’s ugly, and because it doesn’t actually verify the network state it can result in things breaking if some problem prevents Windows from pulling a valid DHCP lease.