Book Image

Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Fifth Edition

By : Thomas Lee
Book Image

Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Fifth Edition

By: Thomas Lee

Overview of this book

The Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook is back with a new edition, featuring over 100 PowerShell recipes that will make your day-to-day work easier. This book is designed to help you learn how to install, configure and use PowerShell 7.2 effectively. To start with, we’ll look at how to install and configure PowerShell 7.2, along with useful new features and optimizations, and show you how the PowerShell compatibility solution bridges the gap to older versions of PowerShell. We’ll also be covering a wide range of fundamental and more advanced use cases, including how to create a VM and set up an Azure VPN, as well as looking at how to back up to Azure. As you progress, you’ll explore topics such as using PowerShell to manage networking and DHCP in Windows Server, objects in Active Directory, Hyper-V, and Azure. We’ll also take a closer look at WSUS, containers and see how to handle modules that are not directly compatible with PowerShell 7. Finally, you’ll also learn how to use some powerful tools to diagnose and resolve issues with Windows Server. By the end of this PowerShell book, you’ll know how to use PowerShell 7.2 to automate tasks on Windows Server 2022 with ease, helping your Windows environment to run faster and smoother.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
Other Books You May Enjoy
16
Index

Reporting on AD Users

Monitoring the Active Directory is a necessary albeit time-consuming task. With larger numbers of users and computers to manage, you need all the help you can get, and PowerShell makes it easy to keep track of things.

If a user has not logged on for a reasonable period, the account could be a security risk. Likewise, a user with membership in a privileged account (for example, Enterprise Admins) could be used by an attacker. IT professionals know how easy it is to put someone in a high privilege group rather than set up more fine-grained permissions using something like Just Enough Administration (see “Implementing JEA” in Chapter 8).

Regular reporting can help focus on accounts that could be usefully de-activated, removed from a security group, or possibly removed altogether.

In this recipe, you obtain all the accounts in the AD and examine potential security risks.

Getting ready

After running the recipes in this chapter, you run this recipe on DC1...