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

Chapter 8. Windows Features and Installed Software Detection

Part of discovering a system's function is determining what Windows features and software titles are installed. In an enterprise environment, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is installed on individual systems. While you can manually log in to servers and evaluate the configurations, it can take a very long time to gather all of the server information.

The Windows server scanning script makes it easy to scan individual Windows features, roles, and software through a variety of cmdlets. You will learn how to scan the registry and individual executable files for information about installed software on your system. This enables you to detect both software that you'd find in add/remove programs, and software that does not add an installed entry in add/remove programs.

In this chapter, you will:

  • Use the get-windowsFeature cmdlet to retrieve server features and roles

  • Evaluate the win32_serverfeature class for feature and roles...