Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp explains how to create your own repeatable PowerShell scripting framework. This framework contains script logging methodologies, answer file interactions, and string encryption and decryption strategies. This book focuses on evaluating individual components to identify the system’s function, role, and unique characteristics. To do this, you will leverage built-in CMDlets and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to explore Windows services, Windows processes, Windows features, scheduled tasks, and disk statistics. You will also create custom functions to perform a deep search for specific strings in files and evaluate installed software through executable properties. We will then discuss different scripting techniques to improve the efficiency of scripts. By leveraging several small changes to your code, you can increase the execution performance by over 130%. By the end of this book, you will be able to tie all of the concepts together in a PowerShell-based Windows server scanning script. This discovery script will be able to scan a Windows server to identify a multitude of components.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
3
Working with Answer Files
Index

Pre-script security


When you want to create an enterprise-ready script, you need to start with your security components. In Chapter 4, String Encryption and Decryption, you learned the importance of leveraging encoding and encryption to provide added security to your scripts. You can follow several enterprise strategies to ensure that you properly implement encoding and encryption. One of the popular strategies is to create an encryption and decryption salt, init, and password that are shared by all of your scripts. While this is a simpler method from a script management perspective, you provide all departments access to the same encrypted data. Alternatively, you can have the departments create their own encoded salt, init, and passwords for scripts. In this, the encrypted data is different than what your department generates. This provides an additional layer of obscurity to the encrypted data as it's implemented in answer files. While this is more secure, it is a bit more difficult to...