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

User profiles


User profiles are a common challenge in enterprises. Since they are autogenerated upon logon and there is no built-in automated functionality to remove local profiles, systems are plagued with old profile accounts. Old profiles not only consume data on systems, they also reveal information about other active accounts in the environment.

PowerShell offers the ability to retrieve user profile information. To retrieve user profiles from a system, you can leverage the get-wmiobject cmdlet calling the win32_UserProfile class. After you retrieve user profile objects, you have the ability to use multiple properties to gather information about the profiles. The .SID property is the security identifier of the user in the profile. While the SID is a unique user number, you can easily translate it with the .NET System.Security.Principal class. You first start by creating a new .NET object by calling the New-Object cmdlet with the System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier class with...