Powershell Needful Things

First version of my PowerPack uploaded

I really wanted to see how complicated it would be to write a very basic PowerPack for PowerGUI.

I had recently updated my WMI defrag script to report to HTML, so I thought this would be an excellent candidate for a PowerPack.

I must admit that, at first it is not very straight forward, but the more time you spend on it the easier it becomes. I am really looking forward to re-create some of my favorite apps / scripts as PowerPacks. I think this is an excellent platform from Quest.

More info and download of the PowerPack is available here.

Suggestions / comments always welcome. Have mercy, it’s my first attempt at a PowerPack.

Update: Automatically clean up orphaned user directories

As an update to the automatic cleanup script, this script will do essentially the same, but will also attempt to take ownership of the folder before renaming it. This was added because some of our users had full control on their folders, and removed all other permission from the folder.

There is a slight problem with get-acl and set-acl. The ownership will fail if you can’t read the ACL. If that fails, as a last resort, the script writes the failures out to a text file, which can be used as a batch file with a little utility called takeown.exe which will take ownership of the folders regardless. On a re-run of the script, the rename will succeed.

You can download the script from here:

Update: Powershell Remote WMI Defrag

As with most things in life, people are only happy with limited features for a little while, and then the enhancement requests pour in.
The administration guys at the office have been using the remote defrag script for a couple of weeks, and soon realised that there was no way for them to show off the results of their labour to management. So inevitably, they requested that I add some sort of reporting to the script which they can send to management.

Initially, I had all the results write out to a text file, for each volume, but this became a mess to manage after you defrag hundreds of servers with multiple volumes. Having recently completed the Exchange 2003 audit script with the use of Virtu-Al’s HTML template, I imagined it would be possible to report the defrag results using a similar format.

The script runs through a list of servers, contained in servers.txt and starts a remote defrag using WMI. It waits for the process to complete and then moves on to the next volume. The script will check if dfrgntfs.exe is running on the remote host, and then skip that server.

The script changes the colour of the drive on the report, based on whether a defrag was actually run or not. Green means it was skipped, orange that defrag was already running and red that it was defragged.

Finally, at the bottom of each drives’ report the script will give you a quick before and after result.

The script can be downloaded from my Skydrive:

Exchange WMI Audit

I recently needed to automate my Exchange 2003 server daily checks. I have done some basic work on this before, but I really needed to automate the process and write the results to HTML to make it more “manager friendly”.

While searching the web for something I could use as a basic start up script, I came across an awesome script on Virtual-Al. This script uses WMI to audit a list of remote computers, and reports in a very neat HTML format. It was exactly the platform I needed, and it meant not having to re-invent the wheel.

I did however have some trouble with WMI and the mailbox stores, and finding a method for reporting the number of users and whether the store is mounted or not. I managed to find a workaround for the number of users, but it seems that checking the store status would have to be done with CDOEXM. This felt like a little too much effort as we are in the middle of our migration to Exchange 2007.

Speaking of Exchange 2007. The script cannot be used against Exchange 2007 servers, as Exchange 2007 does not include any WMI providers.
I am however working on an Exchange 2007 version or an Exchange version check process for this script. All credit for the HTML template and the original script should go to Alan Renouf, I merely took a great script and adapted it for use with Exchange.

The script will show only Exchange related information on the report, this includes Hotfixes, Services and Event Log entries. The version of the script which I use myself, creates an HTML menu, with a list of all of the servers processed and links to their individual reports. It also moves the files to a web server, which makes it much more automated. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

This script is not displayed in a code window, but can be downloaded from here:

Update Network Interface Card parameters using WMI

The following little function can be used if you need to manually override DNS and WINS addresses on a list of remote computers, where they may have already obtained addresses from a DHCP server. The code gets a list of IP enabled NICs from a remote computer using WMI, you can list the servers in servers.txt file in the same folder. The script updates your DNS servers search list to add two manual entries and also adds two manual WINS servers. I had some fun the SetWINSServer method as it only accepts the variable as an array. Finally, the script modifies the registry, to create a DNS suffix search list. Although this script only modifies limited parameters, it can easilly be adapted to update any of the other parameters.

function updateNIC {
$NICs = gwmi -computer $server Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | where{$_.IPEnabled -eq “TRUE”}

foreach ($NIC in $NICs) {

$DNS=("1.1.1.1","2.2.2.2")
$WINS=@("1.1.1.1","2.2.2.2")
$DOMAIN="acme.com"

$NIC.SetDNSServerSearchOrder($DNS)
$NIC.SetDynamicDNSRegistration("TRUE")
$NIC.SetWINSServer($WINS[0],$WINS[1])
$NIC.SetDNSDomain($DOMAIN)

$baseKey = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey('LocalMachine', $server)
$baseKey.OpenSubKey
$subKey=$baseKey.OpenSubKey("SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\Tcpip\\Parameters",$true)
$subkey.SetValue('SearchList','acme.local,acme.com')

}
}
foreach($server in (gc .\servers.txt)){
updateNIC
}

Here are some images of the results of the Advanced TCP/IP Settings page after running the script. Here is the WINS tab.