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

XML answer file creation


Answer files are essential to creating flexible PowerShell scripts. They provide the ability to change a script's function without actually modifying the code of the script itself. For the Windows server scanning script, there are several key items that you will want to include in your answer file.

The core components to include in the scanning script answer file are:

  • Security information: This will include the AFD, salt, init, and other important encoded or encrypted data for the script.

  • Logging: This will provide the ability to enable and disable writing to the event log, writing on the screen, and writing to a log file.

  • Features: This will include the full list of scanning features of the script, and the ability to turn them on or off.

  • Search data: This will include encrypted search information for identifying sensitive data on systems.

  • Kill file location: This will provide the location of where the script termination file is located.

  • Directory scan list: This...