At the end of May I will be speaking at the New York PowerShell User Group about using Microsoft Flow to automate your personal work at the Microsoft Offices in New York. If you are in the New York area and interested in Microsoft Flow, PowerShell or automation in general be sure to sign up and drop by on the 31st of May.
After a busy week at the PowerShell Conference Europe last week, blog post about this event is coming up soon! This week will be all about cloud based automation in both the form of Azure Functions as well as Microsoft Flow.
I will be speaking about this at the UK Cloud Infrastructure User Group, PowerShell Southampton, WinOps, PowerShell London UK and a collaboration between the Scottish PowerShell & DevOps User Group and the Glasgow SQL User Group.
Are you in the UK and are you interested in Cloud Automation using Microsoft Flow or Azure Functions? Then have a look at the following dates and places and sign up while the seats last:
If you cannot make it to any of the events, I will be sharing out the content presented. I look forward to meeting you there!
Occasionally groups may become obsolete or are never populated with members. It can be interesting to find out how many groups are in your organization that have no members, as action can be taken on it based on the output.
| Overview of articles in this series |
| Active Directory Friday: Find groups with no members |
| Active Directory Friday: Principal group membership |
| Active Directory Friday: User account group membership |
Because of the nature of how group membership is defined this article will be the first in a series of three. In this article I will show how group membership can be determined using an LDAP queries. The next article in this series will go into principal group membership and its implications and the final article will go into constructed attributes and how to work with constructed attributes, specifically the memberof attribute.
In this article I will give a a number of examples that can be used to determine which groups are empty. Using Get-ADGroup the following command can be executed to retrieve memberless groups:
Get-ADGroup -LDAPFilter '(!(member=*))' |
Alternatively the DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher object can be used to achieve a similar result:
(New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher -Property @{ Filter = '(&(objectClass=group)(!(member=*)))' PageSize = 100 }).FindAll() |
The [adsisearcher] type accelerator is another interesting alternative for this purpose, here is an example:
([adsisearcher]'(&(objectClass=group)(!(member=*)))').FindAll() |
The problem with the above examples however, is that some groups will show up as being empty, for example the Domain Users group. Next week I will go into Principal group membership, what this is and how to query for this and by doing so generate more accurate results in regards to group membership.
For more information about the topics discussed in this article, please have a look at the following resources:
| Active Directory Friday: Find groups with no members |
| Get-ADGroup |
| JaapBrasser.com – Active Directory Friday |
| Free ebook – Active Directory Friday All Articles |
| DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher |
One of the things that keeps me busy is maintaining the library of scripts I have made available in the TechNet Script Library. Earlier this week I noticed a request for my Get-ScheduledTask script, a script that gets a list containing the scheduled tasks from either the local machine or a remote system. The request stated if it was possible to create a function that could delete scheduled tasks.
Based on this question I had a look at the Get-ScheduledTask script and decided that it requried an additional property in the custom object that it outputs, the computer name. Using both the computer name and the path of a scheduled task I am able to delete scheduled tasks on both local systems as well as remotely.
Here is an example of Remove-ScheduledTask in combination with Get-ScheduledTask:
.EXAMPLE
.\Get-ScheduledTask.ps1 | Where-Object {$_.State -eq 'Disabled'} | Remove-ScheduledTask -WhatIf
Description
-----------
Get-ScheduledTask will list all the disabled tasks on a system and the Remove-ScheduledTask function will list all the actions that could be taken
For more information or the direct download links of these scripts please refer to the links below. Feel free to leave a comment either here or in the TechNet Script Library.
| TechNet Script Gallery |
| My entries in TechNet Script Gallery |
| Get-ScheduledTask |
| Remove-ScheduledTask |
One of the things that keeps me busy is maintaining the library of scripts I have made available in the TechNet Script Library. I get a good number of questions and requests about my scripts there and I enjoy picking out some of the interesting or useful requests to implement them in my scripts. Recently I received some requests for new functionality in some of my scripts so I decided two of my scripts for the latest round of updates.
For Connect-Mstsc I have updated both the PowerShell 3.0 and up version as well as the version that is backwards compatible with PowerShell 2.0. A new parameter has been introduced, -Public, which corresponds with the /public switch of the mstsc.exe tool. It runs Remote Desktop in public mode, which was requested by MSFTW. Here is an example of this switch parameter in action:
.EXAMPLE
Connect-Mstsc -ComputerName server01:3389 -User contoso\jaapbrasser -Password supersecretpw -Public
Description
-----------
A RDP session to server01 at port 3389 will be created using the credentials of contoso\jaapbrasser and the /public switch will be set for mstsc
Get-OrphanHomeFolder has been updated to support wildcards/regular expressions to be able to exclude folders. This came from a request of martin_i who has a lot of folders named .v2 which he would like to exclude instead of manually specifying each path. Here is an example:
.EXAMPLE
.\Get-OrphanHomeFolder.ps1 -HomeFolderPath \\Server02\Fileshare\Home -MoveFolderPath \\Server03\Fileshare\MovedHomeFolders -ExcludePath '\.v2$' -RegExExclude
Description:
Will list all the folders in the \\Server02\Fileshare\Home folder and will move orphaned folders using robocopy, excluding folders that end with .v2
For more information or the direct download links of these scripts please refer to the links below. Feel free to leave a comment either here or in the TechNet Script Library.