Jason Yoder, MCT

This was the final project of my March PowerShell class in Portland Maine.  This is the “Real World” task that the class brought in.  They needed to be able to specify OU in which code would be sent to each client based on the model number of that client.  Below is the code.   To run it, dot source it into your PowerShell session and to a Get-Help Send-Code –Full command to learn how to use it.  I left a final challenge in the NOTES filed for the class. Function Get-ComputerList { Param ( [Parameter(Mandatory = $True )] $OUName ) # Get the target OU Object from AD. $OUName = " * " + $OUName + " * " $TargetOU = Get-ADObject -filter ' Name -like $OUName ' # Build a list of clients to target. $TargetObject = @() $Computers = Get-ADComputer -filter * -SearchBase $TargetOU ForEach ( $Computer in $Computers ) { $Obj = New-Object PSObject $Obj | Add-Member...

While testing some code that used PowerShells Invoke-Command to send code to both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, I discovered an inconsistency in the way Windows Remoting is applied to both platforms. The servers worked fine.  Even though I disabled to firewall for testing, I received this error when sending commands to the Windows 7 client:   [ClientName] Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The client cannot connect to the destingatoin specified in the request.  Verify that the service on the destination is running and is accepting requests.  Consult the logs and documentation for the WS-Management service running on the destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM.  If the destination is the WinRM service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and configure the WinRM service” winrm quickconfig”.  For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. + CategoryInfo   ...

This method utilizes PowerShell to discover the number of days since a local account password has been changed.  For this process, we are going to take a look at the local Administrator account. First, open PowerShell. $admin = [ADSI]"WinNT://./Administrator,user" This collected the Administrator object and placed it in a variable called $admin $Admin.PSBase.Properties This will list some of the properties of this account. The PasswordAge property reports the password age in seconds.  To convert this to days, we will need to divid it by 86400 (60 seconds in a minute  X  60 minutes in an hour X 24 hours in a day). ($Admin.PasswordAge.Value)/86400 436.432361111111 First the command evaluates the content in the parenthesis. This will be the value of the PasswordAge property as an integer value. Then we divide by 86400 seconds to get the result in days.

Sometimes you come across a user account or maybe a resource that is named in a way that is not common to your native language.  When users search for this resource they may have some difficulty.  In Active Directory there is now several phonetic attributes to help your users out. ms-DS-Phonetic-First-Name Contains the phonetic given name or first name of the person. ms-DS-Phonetic-Last-Name Contains the phonetic last name of the person. ms-DS-Phonetic-Department Contains the phonetic department name where the person works. ms-DS-Phonetic-Company-Name Contains the phonetic company name where the person works. ms-DS-Phonetic-Display-Name The phonetic display name of an object. In the absence of a phonetic display name the existing display name is used.   To test this I manually populated the ms-DS-Phonetic-First-Name attribute with Bbrraadd for the user named Brad.  In Active Directory Users and computers, I did a search for the name Bbrr .  It returned th...

In class we had a project that required us to read in a text file that started with a users email address and then was followed by dates on the same line.  The data file appeared as below JDoe@contoso.com,1/12/2012,1/13/2012,1/14,2012 JaneD@contoso.com,2/3/2012,3/4/2012 The requirement was for this script to run every morning and expire any accounts who had a date that matched the current date.  Also, any accounts who’s expiration date was the previous day needed to be un-expired.  Below is the code to do it.   <# Function : Test - File Verifies that a file exists . Returns True is the file is present . #> Function Test-File { param ( $FilePath , $FileName ) $TestPath = $FilePath + "\" + $FileName $FileReady = Test-Path -path $TestPath Write-output $FileReady } #End: Test File <# . SYNOPSIS Confirms if a module is available . . DESCRIPTION Confirms if the provided parameter is available on the local c...

The objective of this one liner is to allow you to enumerate all the shares on a client. Then recurse through the files and folders to get the NTFS permissions on each. Get-WmiObject Win32_Share | Select-Object – Property Path | Get-ChildItem – recurse | get-acl To get only directorys: Get-WmiObject Win32_Share | Select-Object – Property Path | Get-ChildItem – recurse | Where-Object { $_ . mode – match “ d ” } | get-acl To only get information on files: Get-WmiObject Win32_Share | Select-Object – Property Path | Get-ChildItem – recurse | Where-Object { $_ . mode – notmatch “ d ” } | get-acl

In PowerShell, you can test to see if a variable or array contains a specific piece of data.  Take the following example: $Arr1 = "PowerShell" , "Rocks" , "The" , "Windows" , "World" If I was interested in knows if this array contained the string “rocks”, I would execute this command: $Arr1 -contains "rocks" The response would be True .  Notice that in the array, the data is spelled with a capitol letter.  The query used a lower case letter.  PowerShell has a case sensitive contains operator called ccontains.  When the same query is executed, but this time with ccontains , the answer returned is False .  If the query was changed to $Arr1 -ccontains "Rocks" Then the response would be True