Shay Levy

The PowerGUI Challenge 2010 contest

Get a chance to win some money by having fun with PowerShell and PowerGUI. Quest has announced The PowerGUI challenge contest (October 15 to November 15) and you can win a lot of prizes. All you have to do is write a PowerPack or an Add-on, if your entry makes it into the top 10 in they will be judged by the contest judges panel which includes: Jeffrey Snover , Hemant Mahawar, Don Jones , Jeffery Hicks , Shay Levy , Brandon Shell , Aleksandar Nikolic , and Marco Shaw . Head over to the PowerGUI Challenge...

New PowerGUI Script Editor Add-on

When you’re working with the PowerGUI script editor , writing new stuff or debugging your scripts, you have several options to run/debug your code: As you can see there are two keyboard shortcuts to run code (F5 and CTRL+F5) and there’s one more to execute selected code (CTRL+F7). When I debug my scripts in the script editor I prefer to use just one shortcut, if there is some selected code run it (Execute Selection) otherwise run everything (Start Debugging). We can set the same shortcut for both...

Alias expansion in PowerGUI Script Editor

In a previous post I wrote about the new PowerGUI Script Editor SDK and showed an example of creating a new Toolbar with one command to expand aliases in the code pane. The ExpandAlias command is now available as an Add-on. The Add-on module creates a new menu item under the Tools menu and assign it a keyboard shortcut (Control+E). Write some code that contain aliases in the script editor code pane Click on the ExpandAlias menu item (or press CTRL+E) to expand aliases: Download the Add-on HERE .

PowerGUI - Take control of the script editor

In his PowerShell Editor Roundup: PowerGUI Pro blog post, Don mentions that PowerGUI's script editor lacks the ability to resolve 'alias-to-cmdlet'. Luckily we don't have to wait for next releases of PowerGUI or submit feature requests to have that functionality available. Starting with the latest product release, PowerGUI 2.1 , we now have the option to extend the Script Editor with our own solutions using the new Script Editor SDK! The Editor SDK allows us to create Add-Ons, add...

PowerShell to the rescue

A member of my team came in this morning with a scripting request: "If we ran a full backup on all of our servers (fixed disks), how much disk space would they all consume altogether? We need to give the boss a ‘ball-park number’ by the end of the day!" So, how can we get that number? Here’s a quick & dirty version. 1. Get all computers objects (names only). We keep our servers in a dedicated OU in active directory. 2. Run a WMI query on all servers and subtract each fixed disk FreeSpace...

Modifying multivalued Active Directory attributes

Updating an attribute value in Active directory is usually not a big deal. Most of the attributes are single valued and you can easily modify them. However, dealing with multi valued attributes is another game. With Quest AD cmdlets you don’t have to pull your hair out, there is special syntax for working with multi valued attributes and you use it via the ObjectAttributes parameter. The syntax is as follows (nested hashtable): Set-QADUser -Identity <Identity> -ObjectAttributes @{ AttributeName...

And the winners are…

Quest announced the winners of its PowerPack Challenge 2009 . Check out the great PowerPacks submitted by the participants, they are available on PowerGUI.org . You’ll probably find a pack that solves a challenge you face in your environment.   The winners are: Most Active Participant - Adam Murray - IIS7 Powerpack Second Most Active Participant - Shannon Ma - NetPoint PowerPack for Windows Management Best PowerPack - Alan Renouf - Virtu-Al.Net VMware Virtual Infrastructure / vSphere scripts...

Are you the Ultimate Script Warrior?

If your answer is positive then Quest Software’s PowerPack Challenge 2009 is for you. Quest Software is sponsoring this contest where you can test your PowerShell scripting skills and get paid . Just create some cool PowerShell scripts using Quest’s PowerGUI , and then post them to their site. Winners can receive up to $1,000 USD to spend on Amazon.com. The event details and rules can be found HERE and on Dmitry’s blog as well, and in this year’s event I’m participating in the contest judges panel...

Protecting OU from accidental deletion

When you create new Organizational Units in Active Directory Users And Computers (ADUC) in Server 2008 (or with RSAT on 2003 domains), ADUC gives you the option to protect the OU from accidental deletion. When this option is selected, ADUC updates the security descriptor of the object and, potentially, its parent, with Deny ACE for the Everyone domain group, which denies all administrators or users of this domain and domain controller the ability to delete this object. Note: This setting does not...

Mailbox Users Storage limit

My morning task today includes the following: get all mailboxes (Exchange 2003) larger than X megs where the associated user mailbox storage limits are overriding the settings of the Mailbox store. Storage limit information for user accounts is available in Active Directory Users and Computers on the user ‘Exchange General’ tab (click on ‘Storage Limits’ at the bottom). The ‘Storage Limits’ dialog box specifies the mailbox storage limits for warning or prohibiting a mailbox-enabled user from sending...

PowerGUI 1.9 is now available

PowerGUI 1.9 has been released. Read the full announcement on Dmitry's blog .

How to inform users that their password is about to expire

I got several requests to publish the latest version of a script I wrote once to retrieve all mail enabled user accounts that have the password configured to never expire. Once the accounts are retrieved, based on the DaysToExpire   variable value, a mail message is sent to the users stating that their password will expire in X days. Notice that the script requires the latest version of Quest AD cmdlets and is also compatible with PowerShell version 1 or 2. $ReqVersion = [ version ] " 1...

List of Exchange 2003 Administrators

The following script lists all the groups or users that have been delegated as exchange admins at the organizational level. There are three types of administrative roles: Exchange Full Administrator Exchange Administrator Exchange View Only Administrator   $cnc = ( Get-QADObject ( Get-QADRootDSE ).ConfigurationNamingContext).DN $DN = " CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,$cnc " Get-QADPermission $DN -Inherited -SchemaDefault | ` Where-Object { $_ .Rights.value__ -match ' 983551|131220...

PowerGUI 1.9

Keep your eyes open on the PowerGUI.org website, v1.9 will be released sometime next week or so. Lots of goodies :)

How to audit AD groups in one line of PowerShell

I was tasked this morning with the following: Get all groups from Active Directory and produce a report that includes each group Name,distinguishedName, the type of the group, its scope, mail address, description and group membership count. Armed with Quest's AD cmdlets I wrote the following. It took 3 minutes to write the code and send it to my manager with PowerShell v2 Send-MailMessage cmdlet: Get-QADGroup -SizeLimit 0 | Select-Object Name , DN , GroupType , GroupScope ,@{Name = " MemberCount...