In an Active Directory environment its typical for client machines to use a local domain controller as their time source, domain controllers with the PDC emulator for the domain and the PDC emulator for the root domain to synchronise time with an external source. In most circumstances the aim is to keep the time synchronised within a 5 minute tolerance level, this will ensure there are no issues with Kerberos authentication which has the 5 minute tolerance as part of its requirements.
The WMI Class Win32_OperatingSystem Caption property returns the particular version of Windows, e.g.:
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise or
Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Enterprise Edition
I had a requirement when querying this via PowerShell to take different actions based on whether the OS was some flavour of 2003 or 2008 and was using the following switch statement :
switch ($OperatingSystem.Caption) { "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise" {$OSBuild = "2008"; break} "Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Enterprise Edition" {$OSBuild = "2003"; break} "Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Standard Edition" {$OSBuild = "2003"; break} default {$OSBuild = "Unknown"} } However, when querying a 2008 R2 server $OperatingSystem.
Following on from the blog post Testing TCP Port Response from PowerShell which provided a means to check that servers had fully rebooted after a patching and reboot cycle, I needed to take this one step further and check that all of the Windows Services set to Automatic successfully started after the reboot.
This should be pretty straightforward since we have a Get-Service cmdlet. Unfortunately however, this cmdlet does not return a StartMode parameter, i.
The UK PowerShell User Group for December 2011 will take place at 19.30 GMT on Thursday December 15t. The topic is ‘Use the WSMAN cmdlets to retreive WMI information and see a demo of the new WMI API’s CIM cmdlets in PowerShell v3 CTP 2’. I’m looking forward to seeing the new CIM cmdlets from V3 CTP2 since I haven’t had chance to play with those yet. Details from Richard Siddaway’s blog are below:
I recently had a requirement to audit the Share and NTFS permissions of a Windows File Server. PowerShell contains the Get-ACL cmdlet which makes retreving the NTFS permissions fairly straightforward, but for the Share permissions it is not so easy, but we can make use of WMI and the Win32_LogicalShareSecuritySetting class.
The below forum post details some discussion around using this class to find the Share permissions and unsurprisingly the legendary Shay Levy provides the solution.
I recently had a task to query NIC information on a number of HP Proliant servers, this included the connected NIC speed, duplex settings and status of the configured HP Team. I initally looked at the WMI class Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration which contains a lot of info around NIC configuration. Unfortunately, it does not include NIC speed or duplex settings.
Looking for alternatives, I discovered a script from Hugo Peeters which instead queried the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} which looked like it would do the job.
WMI in Windows Server is a treasure trove of information and well worth investigating, particularly when needing to run reports against many servers. In addition it is possible for third-parties to make use of WMI and store their own information in there. This is true of a recent requirement I had to monitor Citrix Licensing.
Whilst it’s obviously critical to purchase enough licenses for Citrix that you need, its also important to not have too many lying around not in use, since you’ll be wasting money.
So I got asked to write an article for the http://www.simple-talk.com/ website, a well known online technical journal and community hub around SQL and .NET technologies. They’ve recently been branching out into Exchange as well hence they reason they were looking for some Exchange based articles.
The article I have written for them is based around a presentation I have made around some user groups a few times now, i.e. using PowerShell and WMI to manage Exchange 2003.
As promised to those who attended the MMMUG on Wednesday night my slides from that evening are available on my SkyDrive.
Enjoy.