Book Image

Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Thomas Lee
Book Image

Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Thomas Lee

Overview of this book

Windows Server 2019 is the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship server operating system. It also comes with PowerShell Version 5.1 and offers a number of additional features that IT professionals will find useful. This book is designed to help you learn how to use PowerShell and manage the core roles, features, and services of Windows Server 2019. You will begin by creating a PowerShell Administrative Environment that features updated versions of PowerShell, the Windows Management Framework, .NET Framework, and third-party modules. Next, you will learn to use PowerShell to set up and configure Windows Server 2019 networking and understand how to manage objects in the Active Directory (AD) environment. The book will also guide you in setting up a host to utilize containers and deploying containers. Further along, you will be able to implement different mechanisms to achieve Desired State Configuration. The book will then get you up to speed with Azure infrastructure, in addition to helping you get to grips with setting up virtual machines (VMs), websites, and file share on Azure. In the concluding chapters, you will be able to deploy some powerful tools to diagnose and resolve issues with Windows Server 2019. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with a number of useful tips and tricks to automate your Windows environment with PowerShell.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook Third Edition
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Reporting on AD users


Managing the Active Directory is an important albeit time-consuming task. Discovering a user account that has not been used for a reasonable period or a user that has membership in a privileged account (for example, enterprise administrators) could represent security risks to the organization. Regular reporting can help to place a focus on accounts that could be usefully de-activated. That could mean the account being removed from a security group or removed altogether.

This recipe creates a report of users, computers, and privileged group membership and displays this report on the console.

Getting ready

This recipe, which you run on DC1, reports on users with possible issues: a user hasn't logged on for a while, has made a lot of bad password attempts, or a user is in a privileged group inappropriately.

How to do it...

  1. Define the Get-ReskitUser function:

    Function Get-ReskitUser {
    # Get PDC Emulator DC
    $PrimaryDC = Get-ADDomainController -Discover -Service PrimaryDC
    # Get...