Everyday Powershell - Part 41 - Get Screen Resolution from remote PCs

Everyday powershell. It's not updated everyday, it's tools you could use daily.

You know sometimes you just need to know what resolution all your computers are running.

get-adcomputer -Filter {operatingsystem -like "Windows 7*"} -Properties operatingsystem | ForEach-Object {     $temp = "" | select computername, ScreenHeight, ScreenWidth, pcon     $temp.pcon = Test-Connection $_.name -Count 1 -Quiet     $temp.computername = $_.name     if($temp.pcon){         $resolution = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $_.name -Class Win32_DesktopMonitor         $temp.ScreenHeight = $resolution.ScreenHeight         $temp.ScreenWidth  = $resolution.ScreenWidth     }     $temp     $temp | export-csv C:\temp\monitoraudit.csv -Append }

Check out the filter on the first line, that can be anything. We just needed Windows 7 machines.

It's a pretty easy foreach-object;

• sets up a temp object in my favorite manner,
• pings the machine to make sure it's up,
• pulls the info we need from WMI
• then bangs it out to the console and a CSV.

Hitting up each machine with a WMI query gets us fast results but it's not exactly complete. You could rejig this so that it ran as part of a login script or schedule it to run daily.

Why do we need this info? Well that's for next time when we'll do something useful with this data set we've created.

Everyday Powershell - Part 26 - Check Server last boot time

Here's a quickie that was useful this week.

$servers = Get-ADComputer -filter {OperatingSystem -like "*Server*"} $report = @() foreach ($server in $servers){     $temp = "" | Select Name, Lastboot     $temp.name = $server.dnshostname     if(test-connection $temp.name -Count 1 -quiet){         $temp.lastboot = [datetime]::ParseExact(((Get-wmiobject -ComputerName $temp.name Win32_operatingSystem).lastbootuptime).Substring(0,12), "yyyyMMddHHmm", $null)     }     else{         $temp.lastboot = $null     }     $report += $temp } $report | sort name

Original inspiration was from here;

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2014/07/20/powertip-use-powershell-to-display-last-boot-time.aspx?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

You see the great thing with powershell is once you know how to do something on one server you can do it on many servers relatively easily. To support some of our older fleet we had to change that query from CIM to WMI and meant some trickery with the Datetime but that’s all pretty simple stuff.

This could be combined with the server shutdown comments script from part 11 to get the reason for the last reboot too!

Everyday Powershell - Part 16 - Monitoring Disk Performance in Powershell

Welcome back to another Everyday Powershell post. It's not powershell we POST every day, it's powershell you could USE everyday.

Today we look at get-counter which you should have a fiddle with if you get the chance. It does a lot more than what we've used it for here. But this may help you get the gist of running performance counters in powershell.

$disks = Get-WmiObject win32_logicaldisk | Where-Object {$_.DriveType -eq 3} | select DeviceID $report = @() $i=1 foreach ($disk in $disks) {     Write-Progress -Activity "Mesuring disk performance" -Status $disk.DeviceID -PercentComplete (($i/$disks.Count)*100)     $temp = "" | select Disk, Read, Write     $temp.disk = $disk.deviceid     $counter = "\LogicalDisk(" + ($disk.deviceid) + ")\Avg. Disk sec/Read"     $temp.read = ((Get-Counter -Counter $counter).CounterSamples.cookedvalue)*1000     $counter = "\LogicalDisk(" + ($disk.deviceid) + ")\Avg. Disk sec/Write"     $temp.write = ((Get-Counter -Counter $counter).CounterSamples.cookedvalue)*1000     $report += $temp     $i++ } $report

We've included the now ubiquitous write-progess to give a useful progress indicator. As well as the old $temp="" | select which sets up a hash table for us to dump data into.

Everyday Powershell - Part 6 - Replacing Printers

This is the next part in an ongoing series about Powershell. You may have heard about how awesome Powershell is but have struggled to find ways to make it useful in your day to day work. That's what this series is going to address. It'll provide scripts and knowledge to address practical everyday problems!

When the print server migrations happen they can be a big pain. Our last migration was breeze for us and the users thanks to Powershell!

This script requires a little more leg work than usual in that you've got to setup a file that can be referred to to map the old print queues to the new ones. Once you've got that though, you're a loop and a few WMI queries away from promised land of automagic printer migration!

The tricky part here is running the script as the user logs on... There are many ways to do this, and there's probably a good post on the subject coming.

$replacements = import-csv "\\SOMENETWORKSHARE\printers.csv"
$printers = Get-WmiObject -class win32_printer # obviously you can tart up this query with a bit of filtering e.g. | where {$_.name -like "*Toshiba*" -and $_.systemname -eq "\\OLD PRINT SERVER" -and $_.name -notlike "*SOMESITE*"}
$default = Get-WmiObject -class win32_printer -Filter "default = $true"

foreach ($printer in $printers)
{
    $printername = ""
    $newprinter = ""
    $newprinterpath = ""
    if ($printer.systemname -ne "\\NewPrintServer")
    {
        $printername = $printer.name
        $newprinter = $replacements | where {$_.old -like "*$printername*"} | select -expandproperty new
        $newprinterpath = '\\NewPrintServer\'+$newprinter
        write-host "Replacing... $printername with $newprinterpath"
        (new-Object -com WScript.Network).AddWindowsPrinterConnection($newprinterpath) | out-null
        $printer.delete()
    }
}

$printername = $default.sharename
$defaultprinter = $replacements | where {$_.old -like "*$printername*"} | select -expandproperty new
(get-wmiobject -class win32_printer | where {$_.sharename -like "$defaultprinter"}).setdefaultprinter() 

This worked really well for our users. The tricky part was mapping the default printer to the new queue. I just ended up running it through the same logic as I'd setup for the replacements.

This is also another good example of a foreach loop in action.

The CSV needs two colums "old" and "new" this should contain the sharenames of the printers you are migrating... Like this;

old,new
old-hp,new-hp
old-samsung,new-samsung

Post a comment if you need any clarification on how to use this.