Book Image

Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook

By : EDRICK GOAD
Book Image

Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook

By: EDRICK GOAD

Overview of this book

Automating server tasks allows administrators to repeatedly perform the same, or similar, tasks over and over again. With PowerShell scripts, you can automate server tasks and reduce manual input, allowing you to focus on more important tasks. Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook will show several ways for a Windows administrator to automate and streamline his/her job. Learn how to automate server tasks to ease your day-to-day operations, generate performance and configuration reports, and troubleshoot and resolve critical problems. Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook will introduce you to the advantages of using Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell. Each recipe is a building block that can easily be combined to provide larger and more useful scripts to automate your systems. The recipes are packed with examples and real world experience to make the job of managing and administrating Windows servers easier. The book begins with automation of common Windows Networking components such as AD, DHCP, DNS, and PKI, managing Hyper-V, and backing up the server environment. By the end of the book you will be able to use PowerShell scripts to automate tasks such as performance monitoring, reporting, analyzing the environment to match best practices, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Searching for and reporting on AD users


Once your AD environment has existed for some time, finding and changing settings in your environment can become difficult. For example, let's say when the domain was first created, all the users had the same logon script named logon.bat. Over time, specific needs arose that caused the creation of logon2.bat, and new_logon.bat, and testlogon.bat, with different users assigned to each script.

As an administrator, you want to consolidate all these logon scripts into one, but you need to know what this will impact. You need to know which logon scripts are being used, who is using which ones, and why the different scripts exist. Thanks to the capabilities of AD and PowerShell queries, these items can easily be found.

In this recipe we will perform multiple queries against Active Directory. We will be returning different information.

How to do it...

Carry out the following steps to search for and report on AD users:

  1. To report on all users and their logon scripts...