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 overview


The Windows server scanning script is an enterprise-ready tool that you can use to inspect systems in your environment. This script can be used as a starting point to enable the creation of your own scripts. When implementing the Windows server scanning script, you need to follow a general workflow to ensure that the script is secure and reliable.

The workflow steps include:

  1. Security key generation: You will create a string generation script that can randomly create your encryption password, salt, and init. You will also leverage encoding to strengthen the password, salt, and init. The output of this script will be used by the encryption function, decryption function, and answer file.

  2. Encryption script: You will then leverage the values that are generated in the security key generation to create an encryption script. This will enable you to encrypt strings for use in your answer File.

  3. Answer file: You will learn the different answers that you will...