Everyday Powershell - Part 8 - Powershell Slideshow

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

First let me congratulate you finding this article! Especially if you came via Google. Finding a blog post on "Powershell Slideshows" among all the "Powerpoint" slideshows would have been an interesting challenge!

Let's say you wanted a PC to boot up and show a slideshow of images in a given folder. Do you think that you'd need some third party software? Could windows photo viewer do it? A colleague of mine was about to create a video in Windows Movie Maker before I asked...

"Why don't we try POWERSHELL?"

$folder = "C:\Users\someuser\Documents\Pictures\" $wait = 1 [void][reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms") $form = new-object Windows.Forms.Form $form.Text = "Image Viewer" $form.WindowState= "Maximized" $form.controlbox = $false $form.formborderstyle = "0" $form.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::black $pictureBox = new-object Windows.Forms.PictureBox $pictureBox.dock = "fill" $pictureBox.sizemode = 4 $form.controls.add($pictureBox) $form.Add_Shown( { $form.Activate()} ) $form.Show() do {     $files = (get-childitem $folder | where { ! $_.PSIsContainer})     foreach ($file in $files)     {         $pictureBox.Image = [System.Drawing.Image]::Fromfile($file.fullname)         Start-Sleep -Seconds $wait         $form.bringtofront()     } } While ($running -ne 1)

Most of this was pinched from here;

https://gist.github.com/zippy1981/969855

Our contribution is the fact it's Fullscreen and the Do While loop. Those clever observers among us will notice the $running will never equal 1 so that do loop is infinite. Which suits our purpose just fine.

What started as a way to settle an argument with a colleague (about the usefulness of powershell in media rich environments) became a great way to demo the windows.forms objects!

Beware though it is a bit of mess from a UI perspective. You can't quit the form once it's shown, you can alt tab and kill it from task manager when you need to close it. It suits what we need because it's just for a PC that boots up and runs a slide show, then shuts down at night. The users won't have to ever touch this PC. This is not something I'd give to end users to interact with. But it's fine for our purposes.

Everyday Powershell - Part 7 - Powershell to Upgrade Powershell 4

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!

This is a script you can run that'll upgrade you to the newest version of the Windows Management Framework (version 4). What's so good about WMF4? Why Powershell 4 is in it!

#http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/D/6/3D61D262-8549-4769-A660-230B67E15B25/Windows8-RT-KB2799888-x64.msu if ($PSVersionTable.psversion.Major -ge 4) {     write-host "Powershell 4 Installed already you don't need this"     Exit-PSSession } $powershellpath = "C:\powershell" function download-file {     param ([string]$path, [string]$local)     $client = new-object system.net.WebClient     $client.Headers.Add("user-agent", "PowerShell")     $client.downloadfile($path, $local) } if (!(test-path $powershellpath)) {     New-Item -ItemType directory -Path $powershellpath } if (($PSVersionTable.CLRVersion.Major) -lt 4) {     $DownloadUrl = "http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/A/4/BA4A7E71-2906-4B2D-A0E1-80CF16844F5F/dotNetFx45_Full_setup.exe"     $FileName = $DownLoadUrl.Split('/')[-1]     download-file $downloadurl "$powershellpath\$filename"     ."$powershellpath\$filename" } #You may need to reboot after the .NET 4.5 install if so just run the script again. if ([System.IntPtr]::Size -eq 4) {     $DownloadUrl = "http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/D/6/3D61D262-8549-4769-A660-230B67E15B25/Windows6.1-KB2819745-x86-MultiPkg.msu" } Else {     $DownloadUrl = "http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/D/6/3D61D262-8549-4769-A660-230B67E15B25/Windows6.1-KB2819745-x64-MultiPkg.msu" } $FileName = $DownLoadUrl.Split('/')[-1] download-file $downloadurl "$powershellpath\$filename" ."$powershellpath\$filename"

You can use this script to save you typing ".net 4.5 framework" and "windows management framework 4" into Google. It's got the Microsoft download URLs hardcoded, and we use our tricky download-file function from weeks ago. Which is the great thing about getting into scripting, you really only have to solve a particular problem once! When the solution is in your script repository you can clone your own work!

The bulk of this script is just checking what .net and powershell versions are installed continuing or breaking depending on that. This should be familiar territory if you've been following along for the past 6 weeks.

We do check the Environment and check if we're running a 64bit version of windows then download the correct WMF file for your OS. That's a bit tricky.

We've also included the WMF for windows 8 so if you've got it installed you can copy and paste that into the $downloadurl (while you wear a potplant for a hat you mad windows 8 bugger you).

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.

The Admins's First Steps

The Admin's first steps on The Scripting Guys is pretty useful to those Admins just getting into powershell

• The Admin’s First Steps: Documenting Servers

• The Admin’s First Steps: Scan Multiple Event Logs

• The Admin’s First Steps: Testing Service Health

• The Admin’s First Steps: Discovering Shares

• The Admin’s First Steps: Empty Groups

• The Admin’s First Steps: Local Group Membership

Everyday Powershell - Part 5 - Terminating AD User Accounts

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!

So today we've got a script that let's us dig into handing arguments from the command line, if statements and a little bit of active directory!

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin #make sure we've got a user to work with $user = $args[0] if ($args.count -lt 1) {     $user = read-host "Please enter the username" } # make sure we've got the right user, not sure if out-gridview -passthru is the best option. $users = get-aduser -Filter "samaccountname -like '$user*'" if ($users.count -gt 1) {     Write-host "More than one user found. Who are we after? (highlight a name and press enter)"     $user = ($users | Out-GridView -PassThru).samaccountname } Set-Mailbox -Identity $user -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true # Removed mailbox and user account $groups = Get-ADuser $user -Properties memberof | select -ExpandProperty memberof $groups | Remove-ADGroupMember -members $user Disable-ADAccount $user $disabledname = (Get-ADUser $user -Properties displayname).displayname + " (Disabled)" Set-aduser $user -DisplayName $disabledname # Tell the Manager $manager = Get-ADUser $user -Properties manager |  %{(Get-AdUser $_.Manager -Properties EmailAddress).EmailAddress} $subject = "$user has been disabled." $body = "HI, $manager, $user has left the organisation. We've disabled the user account." Send-MailMessage -From "helpful@helping.com" -to $manager -Subject $subject -Body $body -SmtpServer smtp.gmail.com

Let's run through this section by section

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin

This line just loads a snapin for exchange it's nifty how powershell can be extended like this.

$user = $args[0]

So you can see we're setting $user to this $args[0] thing... this is how we tell our script to accept the "arguments" that came after the name of our script. If you save the whole script to c:\temp\terminate-user.ps1 you could call the script with an argument like this;

C:\temp\terminate-user.ps1 USERNAME

This would run the script with $user set to the argument "USERNAME". The [0] is just refering to the first argument handed to the script (yup you can hand more than one!)

if ($args.count -lt 1)
{
    $user = read-host "Please enter the username"
}

This chunk is our first if statement. We're checking the .count of $args to see if there is Less Than (-lt) 1. IF there aren't any $args we ask the operator for a username using read host. IF $args.count is 1 or greater powershell knows to skip over the script block defined by the curly braces { and }

$users = get-aduser -Filter "samaccountname -like '$user*'"

Doing a similar thing here with $users... We're going out to Active Directory and finding all the accounts with a name like $user 

if ($users.count -gt 1)
{
    Write-host "More than one user found. Who are we after? (highlight a name and press enter)"
    $user = ($users | Out-GridView -PassThru).samaccountname
}

Now we're checking $users to see if it has a .count Greater Than (-gt) 1. If it does we throw a warning and give the operator a grid of users to pick from. We do this so we can be sure that we're disabling the user we mean to.

Set-Mailbox -Identity $user -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

Hiding the user from the Global address list.

$groups = Get-ADuser $user -Properties memberof | select -ExpandProperty memberof
$groups | Remove-ADGroupMember -members $user

Removing the user from all AD groups by creating $groups populated with all the groups $user is a member of then piping $groups to remove-adgroupmember... Isn't powershell cool!?

Disable-ADAccount $user
$disabledname = (Get-ADUser $user -Properties displayname).displayname + " (Disabled)"
Set-aduser $user -DisplayName $disabledname

This next bit disables the user... and then we add (Disabled) to the display name. This way anyone snooping through AD won't freak out when they discover staff that have departed. 

$manager = Get-ADUser $user -Properties manager |  %{(Get-AdUser $_.Manager -Properties EmailAddress).EmailAddress}
$subject = "$user has been disabled."
$body = "HI, $manager, $user has left the organisation. We've disabled the user account."

Send-MailMessage -From "helpful@helping.com" -to $manager -Subject $subject -Body $body -SmtpServer smtp.gmail.com

Lastly we have a little value add for the users manager. We send them a little email so they can be sure the account has been disabled. You'll have to jiggle that send-mailmessage command so it works in your environment.

I knew this was coming...

How long is it from the time the boss becomes aware of a particular capability until we are asked to use it across the whole organisation...?

Not long ;D

http://occasionalutility.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/deleting-emails-from-users-mailboxes.html

Some bit of communication got out of the gates too early and the Boss wanted a "recall"

It was really rewarding to be able to say "No problem Boss! We've got a script for that." Clickety Click, she's all fixed!

My advice? Start building your arsenal of awesome scripts as soon as you can.

Everyday Powershell - Part 4 - Chore List

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!

I found this in my travels a while back;
http://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/1n8w5w/assigning_daily_family_chores/

It's not my script but I have made a couple of changes for the sake of compatibility. I've picked it out because it's a fantastic idea and a great opportunity to look at two important functions in powershell. import-csv and foreach.

Have a look at the script;

# requires -version 2 # Chores.ps1 # Parses chores.csv, randomly assigns the chores and sends an email to each person # Retrieves family members from family.csv. First person listed in family.csv receives full summary email $today = (get-date).DayOfWeek $chores = import-csv chores.csv | where-object {$_.$today -eq 1} | select Chore, Weight $chores = $chores | get-random -count ($chores.count) | sort-object -property Weight -Descending $family = import-csv family.csv $choremsg = @() $smtpuser = "person@gmail.com" $smtppassword = "notapassword" write-host Generating chores list for $Today # Create first column in $chorelist array to hold the names of who is doing the chore foreach ($familymember in $family) {     $choremsg = $choremsg + ("`r`n" + $familymember.person + "'s Chores for the day:`r`n-------------------------------`r`n") } $choreworker = 2 foreach ($chore in $chores) {     $choremsg[$choreworker - 1] = $choremsg[$choreworker - 1] + $chore.chore + "`r`n"     $choreworker++     if ($choreworker -gt $family.count) { $choreworker = 1 } } $choremsg = $choremsg + ("`r`nPlus other duties as assigned `r`n") $choremsg $choremsgsubject = ("Chores for " + $today) $smtpconn = new-object system.net.mail.smtpClient $smtpconn.host = "smtp.gmail.com" $smtpconn.port = 587 $smtpconn.EnableSsl = $true $smtpconn.Credentials = new-object system.net.networkcredential($smtpuser,$smtppassword) foreach ($familymember in $family) {     $smtpconn.send('person@gmail.com',$familymember.email,$choremsgsubject,$choremsg) }

It's a cool bit of powershell that automates dishing out household chores to the family. You need to setup 2 CSV files for this to work.

Chores.csv Chore,Sunday,Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday,Friday,Saturday,Weight Feed dog,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 Feed cat,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 Clean Main Floor Bathroom,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,3 Family.csv Person, Email Dad,dad@gmail.com Mom,mom@gmail.com kid1,kid1@gmail.com kid2,kid2@gmail.com

Once you've got those CSV files we can use the import-csv function to pull them into powershell as objects that we can use!

Give it a try! Fill $family with the content of the CSV
$family = import-csv family.csv

Cool now just type;
$family

You'll see that your CSV is now a powershell object with properties corresponding to the column headers in your CSV.

Now try
$family.person

This'll just give you all the people. Now try
$family.email

This'll output just the emails.

The other thing to note with this script is the foreach command. Basically this is saying for each thing in a group of things do something. This kind of loop is used all the time in powershell and it's worth taking some time to get your head around.

This script is the essence of Everyday Powershell! Scripting with powershell shouldn't be intimidating, it's automation made awesome! The best way to learn is to just get stuck in and start solving problems and I can't think of much better problems to solve than eliminating arguments about who does what around the house!

So big thanks to Reddit user MessageforyouSir for this little gem. It's a been great excuse to play with and learn about import-csv! Oh and remember if you want to schedule a script check out Part 1 of this series.

Security Note - The security aware among you will note that the script requires that you hard-code a password in plain text. This is generally not considered good practice and wouldn't be necessary if you run you own SMTP server that allows relaying. There's probably a post or two just in managing and storing and using credentials in this way. You'll have to stay tuned for those.