Monday, November 18, 2013

They're having a laugh right?

So I'm doing some doco on our Active Directory Forest Restore procedure and found this gem in the documentation... The excess of procedural detail here made me giggle.


Do we really need such detailed instructions to add 100,000 to another number?

Here's the original article if you don't believe it;
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8e3e4377-ef54-4a70-9215-a5d2ba4d0eb9(v=ws.10)#RaiseRIDPool

I mean I get that this is probably because someone made a bad mistake with this process back in the day and Microsoft are covering themselves.

BUT I'd PREFER to believe that is some passive aggressive technical writer having a dig at relative intellect of the average Active Directory admin.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

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;

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.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

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).


Wednesday, October 30, 2013

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.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

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.

Monday, October 21, 2013

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.