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

Windows server scanning script creation


As you start building your version of the Windows server scanning script, you will want to follow a script structure. When you use a standardized script structure, you organize your code into different sections. This allows you to quickly find components in your scripts and add to the individual sections. It also provides an easy platform for others to quickly learn and modify your scripts.

The following sections make up the Windows server scanning script:

Comment block: This is where you describe the function of the script.

Parameter block: This is where you can pass in variables and data into the script, such as the Runtime Decryptor.

Answer file reading function: This enables you to dynamically read the different values in the answer file.

Decryption function: This enables you to decrypt encrypted strings during runtime.

Populating script answers into variables and arrays: This will take the output from the answer file reading function to populate...