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Read-Only Friday March 10, 2023

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It’s Friday, and I’m going to keep this one short in sweet copy. I’ve mentioned this module before, but it is so helpful if you use any of the products, that I want to make sure you don’t miss out on it! Yes, I know it’s Read-Only Friday, but this module will step up your documentation game ten fold.

AsBuiltReport on Github or you can find them on asbuiltreport.com.

What they have created is multiple modules depending on the product you need documentation on, and with one quick line of code, you get a full breakdown of the product you requesting information on. How about a 144 page document on your Active Directory? Not bad, right?

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

GitHub:
https://github.com/AsBuiltReport

Website:
https://www.asbuiltreport.com/

One-Liner Wednesday March 8, 2023

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Are you using VMWare? Ever had to troubleshoot why a VM isn’t working? Or need to know the status of a virtual machine? If you haven’t used PowerCLI before(I know I’ve mentioned it previously), check out this one liner.

 get-vm servername | select-object name, powerstate, usedspacegb, provisionedspacegb

What this does is first finds the server you are looking for with “servername.” Then it shows the server name, whether it is turned on or off, how much storage space is used, and finally how much storage is provisioned. This gives you a very quick overview of the status of the server.

I know, very simple, but it works… and you can expand on this. You could not put a servername in, and it will show all of your virtual machines with the information above.

What about if you have 100s or even 1,000s of servers, you could export to gridview or even better to excel with the importexcel module for filtering.

Hope you found this useful, and if your not already using the PowerCLI module to start using it and make your life easier.

PowerShell Gallery:
PowerCLI

One-Liner Wednesday February 22, 2023

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Ever wanted a quick and easy way to see what operating systems all your computers are running to the detail of the version number? Then wanting to know the last time they logged on?

PowerShell provides a powerful and efficient way to perform this task. In this blog post, we will show you how to use a PowerShell one-liner to search for computers in a specific OU and view their name, operating system, OS version, and last time they logged in.

Searching for computers in a specific OU

You can start by searching for computers in a specific OU. The “Get-ADComputer” cmdlet can be used to retrieve information about computer objects in Active Directory. Here is an example command that retrieves all computers in the “Computers” OU:

Get-ADComputer -SearchBase "OU=Computers,DC=example,DC=com" -Filter * -Properties Name, OperatingSystem, OperatingSystemVersion, LastLogonDate

This command uses the “-SearchBase” parameter to specify the distinguished name of the search base where the search should be conducted. In this case, we are searching in the “Computers” OU of the “example.com” domain. You should replace this with the distinguished name of the OU you want to search in.

The “-Filter” parameter is used to retrieve all computer objects in the specified OU, and the “-Properties” parameter is used to specify the properties you want to retrieve. In this case, we are retrieving the “Name”, “OperatingSystem”, “OperatingSystemVersion”, and “LastLogonDate” properties.

Formatting the output

The output of the previous command is not very user-friendly, so we need to format it to make it easier to read. We can use the “Select-Object” cmdlet to select the properties we want to display and format the output using the “Format-Table” cmdlet. Here is the final PowerShell one-liner:

Get-ADComputer -SearchBase "OU=Computers,DC=example,DC=com" -Filter * -Properties Name, OperatingSystem, OperatingSystemVersion, LastLogonDate | Select-Object Name, OperatingSystem, OperatingSystemVersion, @{Name="LastLogonDate";Expression={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.LastLogonDate)}} | Format-Table -AutoSize

This command retrieves all computer objects in the specified OU and selects the “Name”, “OperatingSystem”, “OperatingSystemVersion”, and “LastLogonDate” properties. The “LastLogonDate” property is converted to a readable date format using the “FromFileTime” method of the “DateTime” class. Finally, the output is formatted using the “Format-Table” cmdlet to display the information in a table format. You could even change “Format-Table” and use “Out-GridView” to give you an excel like experience where you can filter and sort columns… and to make it even more advance if you are trying to remove or disable computers, you could use the Out-GridView with a “-PassThru” parameter then pipe it to a delete or disable. ***Make sure to use -WhatIf so you don’t by accident delete all of the computers that you searched for!

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have shown you how to use a PowerShell one-liner to search for computers in a specific OU in your Active Directory and view their name, operating system, OS version, and last time they logged in. This information can be very useful for managing your domain and keeping track of your computers. This can be used for reporting and for autoamating tasks that only pertain to certain versions of Windows OS. By using PowerShell, you can quickly and easily retrieve this information and format it in a way that is easy to read and understand while using it for automations.

Read-Only Friday January 13, 2023

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Today’s Read-Only Friday is about retiring/upgrading servers. Don’t worry no changing code today, but with Server 2012R2 going end of support Oct 10, 2023, I want to make sure you are aware and prepared to do it. By no means is this the definitive guide to do it, but hope this helps you create or improve your process for upgrading servers. Right now, I’d put a reminder in your calendar so you don’t forget and that you have enough time to take action on those servers.

I know it will depend greatly on what is on the server, but first thing before doing anything is making sure you have a valid backup. I’m not just talking about that your backup server of choice says it backed it up successfully, but actually restoring the server/files needed from the backup to ensure it works. We are decommissioning it for a reason, but while going through the process we want to make sure we have a backup just in case.

Next, I’d go through the server and make sure all services/software are documented as well as any important files. Even if you have documentation, I’d double check that all of it is correct, and that someone didn’t go out of scope and install something on it without documenting it. The last thing you need is when you shutdown the server or setup the replacement server that a department can’t do their work because the product they need isn’t online anymore.

A PowerShell one liner I’d recommend is “Get-WindowsFeature | Where installed” for one computer or you could run “Get-WindowsFeature -computername serv01,serv02 | Where installed” then you could pipe it to CSV or Excel to make it easier for documentation.

Then to get all programs installed

$InstalledSoftware = Get-ChildItem "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall"

foreach($obj in $InstalledSoftware){write-host $obj.GetValue('DisplayName') -NoNewline; write-host " - " -NoNewline; write-host $obj.GetValue('DisplayVersion')}

This can be exported as well for easier documention as well.

Now that we know we have good back ups, we know what services/applications installed, and we did a once over for any out scope configs, I would ask your team to look over what you have to make sure nothing was missed. The more you do these, the less time it will take, but it’s always good to have a second set of eyes on it.

Great, with it having a second set of eyes on it, we can now build the new machine. Depending on your virtualization platform(Hoping you a test environment, if not look at AutomatedLabs), I’d create a PowerShell script to build the server, or if you have templates already, I’d use PowerShell to make the copy then configure IP and any one off applications and servers, as well as any files that would need to be on it. Make sure all windows updates are done to ensure none of them will break it. Once you have confirmed everything is working on the newer server os, you can now deploy it to production(Make sure to turn off the old one if it will cause issues). Before deploying it to production, I’d send out communication to users in case for some reason there is an issue, they will let you know right away or if there is anything they have to do on their side.

At this point I’d put all of the documentation for the new server together if you haven’t already which should be easy, as most of it is right in scripts. Once the new server has been working for a safe amount of time as it will depend on the importance of server, you can remove the old server and test server from your host(s).

I could definitely go in more depth on this, and if you have any questions on checklists or what to actually keep for documentation, let me know and I’d be glad to help out.

And yes, I know this is a Read-Only Friday topic, but most of the hard work is on the planning/documenting side which you can do on Read-Only Friday.

One-Liner Wednesday December 28, 2022

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Today’s one-liner Wednesday will be great for system admins that need to see when and which updates were installed on a single server or multiple servers. It’s a quick and dirty way to do it, and I’m going to look around and see if there is a one with better formatting, but this gets the job done for now.

If you only need updates on one computer for the month of September 2022, this is all you need to do.

Export-InstalledPatchTOPDF -ComputerName localhost -month 9 -Year 2022

If you need multiple computers and want for a whole year, you would write this.

Export-InstalledPatchTOPDF -ComputerName localhost, server01, server02, server03 -Year 2022

And that’s it. As mentioned the output formatting could be a little better, but the functionality is great, and will reach out to him to see if he will be fixing it. If not, I’ll definitely be looking for another option.

PowerShell Gallery:
ExportInstalledPatchToPDFUpdated

Blog:
Prakash78

One-Liner Wednesday December 14, 2022

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Ever have to migrate a share? Or see who is still accessing a share you need to do work on and want to make sure everyone is off of it so the user doesn’t lose any data? Here is the perfect one liner.

Get-wmiobject -computername ServerName win32_serverconnection | select-object sharename,username,computername

All you have to do is put your Server name in and then this will show all shares that users are connected to with their computer name. You could run it right on your server you want to check the shares on as well. This has been super helpful when doing maintenance and when we’ve had to migrate storage to different servers/locations.

Microsoft Learn:
Get-wmiobject