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 features


When you are trying to determine the function of a Windows server, typically you start by evaluating the Windows features and roles. PowerShell has multiple methods to query server features and roles on a system. The get-WindowsFeature cmdlet, available in Server 2008 R2 and higher, provides a simple display of the features and roles installed on a system. The get-WindowsFeature cmdlet has multiple properties including the DisplayName property, Name property, Installed property, Parent property, and the InstallState property. The DisplayName property is the friendly name of the service. The Name property is the short version of DisplayName. The Installed property is a true or false property that reflects if the feature is installed. The InstallState property provides information as to whether the feature is installed, removed, or available for installation.

To query a server for the installed server features, you can perform the following:

get-WindowsFeature | where {$_.Installed...