Subscribe via RSSEarlier this week I was helping someone out on a problem working with the local administrators group. There are a variety of ways to enumerate the members of a local group. The code he was using involved WMI. I hadn’t really worked with the WMI approach in any great detail so I thought I’d see…
Get File Utilization by Extension
In the past I’ve posted a few PowerShell functions that provide all types of file and folder information. The other day I had a reason to revisit one of them and I spent a little time revising and expanding. This new function, Get-Extension will search a given folder and create a custom object for each…
ScriptBlocks On the Fly
I’m always preaching about writing PowerShell scripts and functions with reuse and modularization in mind. You should never have to write the same block of code twice. But what about in the shell during your daily grind? Perhaps today you’re dealing with some issue and periodically need to run a particular block of code. Now,…
Get WMI Namespace
PowerShell and WMI just seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly, beer and pretzels, or salt and pepper. However, discovering things about WMI isn’t always so easy. There are plenty of tools and scripts that will help you uncover WMI goodness, but here’s another one anyway. Today’s PowerShell function will get all namespaces…
Managing VirtualBox with PowerShell
In my line of work I simply can’t afford not to use virtualization, and I use just about all the major tools from time to time. But most of the time I rely on the free VirtualBox program from Oracle. One of the reasons I like it is it’s relatively low footprint. It is not…
Get PowerShell View Definitions
When you write objects to the pipeline in Windows PowerShell, at the end of the pipeline PowerShell’s formatting system handles displaying the results to the console. It accomplishes this by using a set of rules stored in XML configuration files. This is why when you run Get-Process you get a table with a pre-defined set…
Creating ACL Reports
I saw a tweet this morning that was a PowerShell one-liner for capturing folder permissions to a text file. There’s nothing wrong with it but it’s hard to be truly productive in 140 characters so I thought I would take the idea and run with it a little bit. Here are some ways you might…
Test Port 2.0
A few years ago I updated a PowerShell script I came across to scan a computer for open ports. My initial revision was aimed at making it more pipeline friendly in PowerShell v1.0. I recently needed to use the function for a project and realized it could benefit from a 2.0 upgrade.
Friday Fun: Start-TypedDemo v2
Not too long ago I posted a function I wrote for doing PowerShell demonstrations. My goal was to simulate a live interactive demo but without the typing so I could focus on explaining and not typing. The first version was a good start but I always had plans for a more feature complete function including…
Get GPO Backup
The GroupPolicy module from Microsoft offers a great deal of functionality from a command line. In terms of regular maintenance or administration it is pretty hard to beat, especially if you have 100s or 1000s of GPOs. When you have such a large number, backing them up is critical and easy to accomplish with the…
TechEd Atlanta – Managing the Registry with PowerShell
My second TechEd talk was about managing the registry with Windows PowerShell. If you were in the session you know that I stressed heavily using the PowerShell provider and cmdlets. For remote computers, leverage PowerShell’s remoting infrastructure. But I also discussed using the “raw” .NET classes as well as WMI (if you are really desperate…
TechEd Atlanta – Troubleshooting with RSoP
I thought my session on troubleshooting with Group Policy and Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) went rather well. I got some great questions and some nice feedback. The session was recorded and you can watch it on the TechEd North America site, even if you didn’t attend. Click here for the session page and video….
Get Process Detail
The other day I posted a snippet of code that I as using to monitor process memory utilization for a few web browsers. I thought the information and technique were useful enough to modularize in the form of a function. Perhaps I want to check working set on a different process or even on a…
Process Snapshot
Yesterday I ended up running an impromptu browser test, comparing memory utilization. See what Twitter can do to your time!! The browsers themselves are really irrelevant. What you might find useful is the little PowerShell code I put together to periodically check and compare the browser processes.
Warning Signs
I was working on a project with an advanced PowerShell function. One of the goals was to take advantage of the common parameters like -ErrorVariable and -WarningVariable so that when you run the function you can save errors and warnings and work with them later. Turns out one of these works and one doesn’t. But…