On the Get-Scripting Podcast we recently caught up with Scott Herold from Quest / Vizioncore whom Alan had attempted to record an interview with at the recent VMWorld conference, but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on which way you look at it) they ran out of time because Scott spent so much time demoing his new project the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative since it was proving incredibly popular.
So when they both got home we hooked up over Skype and had a lot of fun recording the interview that way instead.
A lot of the scripting I have done with PowerShell has been around manging Active Directory and up till now the majority of that work has been with the Quest AD cmdlets which are brilliant for this job. Of course not everyone is always able to install third-party cmdlets into their environment and for other reasons I have been as keen as anyone to see native cmdlets released for AD.
Recently I needed to check some registry key values on a bunch of servers. There were far too many servers to make this a manual task and in addition if they weren’t what I was expecting then I needed to change them.
Shay Levy has very helpfully published a Stand Alone Registry Functions Library which I made use of. It allows you to query and set registry values for things such as DWords, Strings, Binary Values on remote machines very easily.
Myself and Alan Renouf from the Get-Scripting Podcast will be presenting this month at the UK Powershell User Group on Thursday 26th March at Microsoft in Reading.
First up on the night will be Richard Siddaway talking to us about using Regular Expressions in Powershell. This was requested at a previous event and I know that Richard is really looking forward to talking about that subject ;-)
Then the Get-Scripting guys will take over:
Today’s UK VMware User Group was a great community content event. Of course there was a sponsor presentation (Veeam) without whom these type of events can’t be put on, but there were also a lot of contributions from people in the group.
We had:
Veeam talking about their reporting and backup products.
Mike Laverick from RTFM education talking about Site Recovery Manager and not the VMware view of it, rather real world struggles - warts and all as he put it.
Whilst monitoring some newly provisioned Citrix servers running on VMware hosts today, I soon became very bored with manually checking how many sessions were on each Citrix VM as the load on each one increased, whilst trying to get it to the optimum level.
I knew it was possible to use Powershell to connect with Citrix servers, but had never really looked into it before. Not surprisingly it turned out to be very straightforward.
Don’t forget 7pm GMT on Thursday February 26th sees Rolf Masuch presenting a Live Meeting to the UK PowerShell User group. Rolf runs the German PowerShell User Group.
Session abstract:
PowerShell as Active Directory Login Script Loginscript, why? The Script Draft in the form editor Start with PowerGUI Editor The script skeleton The script details Get in running Output of information Formatting of the information Putting the script on the server The path on the domain controller Setting the users login script Running .
As promised to those who attended the MMMUG on Wednesday night my slides from that evening are available on my SkyDrive.
Enjoy.
At last week’s UK Powershell Usergroup Jonathan Noble was showing us some Powershell examples and at one point demonstrated something similar to the below.
Essentially you create an empty array, but then somewhat surprisingly (well to me anyway) you can select some elements even though they don’t exist! You are then able to add to the array using the names you have selected.
$MYInfo = "" | select-Object Name, CPUUsage,Owner, ProcessID $MYInfo.
Coming up in February are two events for the UK Powershell User Group.
Following the Technet Event Managing Windows Servers with Powershell V2 on Feb 10th at Microsoft London there will be a Powershell UserGroup meeting. My good friend Jonathan Noble will be travelling down all the way from the North of England to present for us about using Powershell to automate tasks in the large University environment he works in - well worth turning up for.