Subscribe via RSSA PowerShell PSDrive is a mapping between a PowerShell provider and a resource. The majority of our work is done in a file system PSDrive that corresponds to a file system drive. Let me show you a little trick that might come in handy with a PSDrive. My “trick” should apply to just about any…
PowerShell Pivot Tables
I was working on a question in the Ask Don and Jeff forum about multidimensional arrays. The ultimate goal of sorts was to create an HTML report that contained in essence a pivot table. This device allows you to slice and dice data so that you can identify trends or patterns. In PowerShell, there aren’t…
Friday Fun: Expand Environmental Variables in PowerShell Strings
This week I was working on a project that involved using the %PATH% environmental variable. The challenge was that I have some entries that look like this: %SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\. When I try to use that path in PowerShell, it complains because it doesn’t expand %SystemRoot%. What I needed was a way to replace it with the…
PowerShell 3.0 Scheduled Jobs Slides and Demos
Yesterday I did a webinar for Idera on the new Scheduled Jobs feature of PowerShell 3.0. If you missed it, I believe you can go to http://www.idera.com/Events/RegisterWC.aspx?EventID=404 and view the archived webcast. I’m assuming that once you register you’ll be given a link for the webcast. In the meantime, I can also offer a PDF…
Find Required Services with PowerShell
Here’s a little PowerShell tidbit to get the status of all the required services. That is, the services that other services depend upon. When using Get-Service, this is the RequiredServices property which will be a collection of service objects. get-service | where {$_.status -eq “running”} | select -expand RequiredServices I’m intentionally omitting and results so…
Working with Access Rules in PowerShell
Yesterday I posted a function to create a summary report of ACL information using Windows PowerShell. I posted this in response to a question in the Ask Don and Jeff forum at PowerShell.com. I received an appreciative followup. The next step for this IT Pro it seems is to get a detailed list of the…
Get ACL Information with PowerShell
I got a question in the “Ask Don and Jeff” forum on PowerShell.com that intrigued me. The issue was working with the results of the Get-ACL cmdlet. The resulting object includes a property called Access which is a collection of access rule objects. Assuming you are using this with the file system, these are System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule…
TechEd 2012 Slides and Demos
At TechEd North America in Orlando, I presented a great session on Group Policy and Windows PowerShell. The session was entitled Group Policy Reporting and Analysis with Windows PowerShell. I co-presented with Group Policy MVP and guru Jeremy Moskowitz. Jeremy played the part of the “pointy-haired” boss, posing questions about Group Policy such as finding…
Get IP Addresses with PowerShell
In celebration of World IPv6 Day, I thought I’d post a little PowerShell code to return IP addresses for a computer. This information is stored in WMI with the Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration class. This class will return information about a number of virtual adapters as well so I find it easier to filter on the IPEnabled property….
Friday Fun: Another PowerShell Console Graph
Late last year I posted a demo script to create a horizontal bar graph in the PowerShell console. I liked it and many of you did as well. But I also wanted to be able to create a vertical bar graph, ie one with columns. This is much trickier since you have to tell PowerShell…
Group Policy Analysis and Reporting with PowerShell
In a few weeks I’ll be presenting at TechEd North America. I hope you already made plans to go because it is sold-out. On Wednesday, June 13th at 8:30AM I’ll be talking about Group Policy and PowerShell; specifically Group Policy Analysis and Reporting with PowerShell. This should be a lot of fun. I’m doing the…
Get My Variable Revisited
Last year I wrote a few articles on working with variables. One task I needed was to identify the variables that I had created in a given PowerShell session with a function I wrote called Get-MyVariable. I also posted an article on identifying the object type for a variable value. While trying to find something…
Query Local Administrators with CIM
Yesterday I posted an article on listing members of the local administrators group with PowerShell and Get-WmiObject. PowerShell 3.0 offers an additional way using the CIM cmdlets. The CIM cmdlets query the same WMI information, except instead of using the traditional RPC/DCOM connection, these cmdlets utilize PowerShell’s remoting endpoint so they are much more firewall…
Query Local Administrators with WMI
I have a quick post today on using WMI to list members of the local administrators group. It is very simple to get the group itself with the Win32_Group class. PS S:\> get-wmiobject win32_group -filter “name=’Administrators'” Caption Domain Name SID ——- —— —- — SERENITY\Adminis… SERENITY Administrators S-1-5-32-544 But the class doesn’t have any methods…
Friday Fun: Get Latest PowerShell Scripts
Probably like many of you I keep almost all of my scripts in a single location. I’m also usually working on multiple items at the same time. Some times I have difficult remembering the name of a script I might have been working on a few days ago that I need to return to. The…