At some times I even have very busy periods… like now. Because of that I tend to not have time or motivation to do any blogging, but that doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything productive.

Because of that I thought “why not just share the work I’m creating?”.

An idea was born….

Then it hit me..

A frequent issue on servers is when services that are supposed to start simply haven’t started.

There’s a simple one-liner that can show you the services that meet these requirements for you:

Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter "Startmode = 'Auto' AND State = 'Stopped' AND ExitCode != 0"

Want to directly start up these services? Not a problem!

A customer required the inventory of product keys for various products on all network systems. I had used a tool which scanned all machines and nicely produced a .csv file for each machine it had scanned.

Ideally I wanted to have a single .csv file which I could then filter against, either using Excel or PowerShell.

The Function

Check the examples notes on how to use the function.

function Merge-CSV{
    <#
            .SYNOPSIS
                Easily merge multiple .csv files into one

            .DESCRIPTION
                Easily merge multiple .csv files into one using splatting to a temporary Output variable
                and adding the content of each .csv file to this Output variable.
                Once each .csv file has been processed, the Output variable is written to a new .csv file.

            .PARAMETER SourceFiles
                Enter paths to multiple .csv files which you would like to merge

            .PARAMETER OutputFile
                Enter filename/path for the merged file

            .NOTES
                Name: Merge-CSV.ps1
                author: Robert Prüst
                DateCreated: 12-06-2015

            .EXAMPLE
                $Licenses = Get-ChildItem -Path c:\Licenses\Export -Filter *.csv
                Merge-CSV -SourceFiles $Licenses -OutputFile c:\Licenses\Overview.csv
    #>

    [Cmdletbinding()]
    param (
        [array]$SourceFiles,
        [string]$OutputFile
    )
    $Output = @()
    foreach ($File in $SourceFiles){
        $TempFile = Import-Csv $File.FullName
        $Output += $TempFile
    }

    $Output | Export-CSV $OutputFile -NoTypeInformation

}

Happy scripting! 🙂

Today I ran into something simple….but I just wanted to get it solved through PowerShell and make the solution re-usable.

We had found a machine in Active Directory which didn’t turn up in the physical inventory check… And worse of all, the machine was active!

The Script

This script simply checks if machines with a specific name [or in a specific OU] is online at the moment. If it’s online, it will try and figure out who’s actually logged on to the machine.

Have you ever created a new user or computer object, but you’re unable to find them in the Default Computers/Users container? Perhaps someone moved the default location to another Organizational Unit [i.e. to make sure GPO’s applied correctly] .

In this case a quick and simple script will check which containers are configured for this task and it will check if they’re using default values or not.

The Script

<#
	.NOTES
	===========================================================================
	 Created with: 	SAPIEN Technologies, Inc., PowerShell Studio 2015 v4.2.95
	 Created on:   	11/3/2015 13:22
	 Created by:   	Robert Prüst
	 Organization: 	powershellpr0mpt.com
	 Filename:      Find-DefaultUserComputerContainer.ps1
	===========================================================================
	.DESCRIPTION
		A description of the file.
#>
Import-Module ActiveDirectory -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
[array]$locations = Get-ADObject -Filter { isCriticalSystemObject -eq $true } | Where { ($_.objectclass -eq 'container' -or $_.objectclass -eq 'organizationalUnit') -and (-not ($_.DistinguishedName -like '*ForeignSecurityPrincipals,DC*')) -and (-not ($_.DistinguishedName -like '*CN=System,DC*')) -and (-not ($_.DistinguishedName -like '*Domain Controllers,DC*')) -and (-not ($_.DistinguishedName -like '*ForeignSecurityPrincipals*')) }


foreach ($location in $locations)
{

	$DistinguishedName = $location.DistinguishedName
	if ($location.ObjectClass -eq 'OrganizationalUnit')
	{
		$DefaultFolder = $false
	}
	else
	{
		$DefaultFolder = $true
	}
	$properties = @{
		'Location' = $DistinguishedName;
		'DefaultFolder' = $DefaultFolder;
	}
	$obj = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property $properties
	$obj
}

Looking for services which are running under NON-standard accounts? Just use this script to display these services.

Very handy in case you need to change passwords for service accounts or want to see what services might be improperly configured [e.g. running under Administrator credentials, or worse, Domain Administrator credentials]

The Script

<#
	.NOTES
	===========================================================================
	 Created with: 	SAPIEN Technologies, Inc., PowerShell Studio 2015 v4.2.95
	 Created on:   	11/3/2015 09:53
	 Created by:   	Robert Prüst
	 Organization: 	powershellpr0mpt.com
	 Filename:     	Get-CustomService.ps1
	===========================================================================
#>
<#
	.SYNOPSIS
		Find services which are running under non-standard accounts

	.DESCRIPTION
		Find services through WMI which are running under non-standard accounts, so you know which services to check/change in case of password changes.
		Non-standard accounts include anything starting with 'NT AUTHORITY\' or LocalSystem.

	.PARAMETER ComputerName
		Enter the computername you'd like to query. Default value is 'localhost'

	.EXAMPLE
				PS C:\> Get-CustomServices -ComputerName 'CONTOSO-SRV001'
				Queries CONTOSO-SRV001 for any services running on non-standard accounts

	.NOTES
		Script created to aid with change of domain admin account passwords.
#>
function Get-CustomService
{
	[CmdletBinding()]
	param
	(
		[string]$ComputerName = 'localhost'
	)

	Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName $ComputerName | Where-Object { $_.StartName -notlike 'NT AUTHORITY\*' -and $_.StartName -ne 'LocalSystem' } | Select-Object SystemName, Name, State, StartName, StartMode
}

Redirected Folders on RDS Session hosts tend to cause a specific issue:

Each user’s set of Redirected Folders creates their own Recycle Bin entry, which can grow quite a bit. The following function can display a list of files contained within the Recycle Bins older than the provided age.

Even better, the script has a switch parameter Remove which does exactly what you think it does 🙂

Through a scheduled task you can run this script on a regular basis when required.

I had a customer who was complaining that the simple overview of disks used by VM’s didn’t add up to the amount of data in use on datastores. Simple reasoning being swap files, snapshots etc. etc. , but the customer wanted to see exactly what was causing this…

In comes PowerCLI [VMWare’s adaption of PowerShell for their solutions]

The Script

Edit: As I had thought at first instance, the datacenter name was working just fine on my 2 test environments, but in a 3rd I quickly ran into an error.

And I’m not talking about the copies from the last 2 days, because this can cause issues if the files aren’t created daily [in case of a weekend], in case a back-up has failed in the meantime or if multiple back-up copies have been made in one day.

While at first I was always playing around with the simple solution by checking file age, I ran into a more elegant solution I’d like to share with you.

I’ve optimized the script to now only query each mailbox once and have increased the speed in this customer’s environment for On-premise from 1 minute 49 seconds to 26 seconds. The Office 365 code was optimized similarly and went down from 22 minutes 14 seconds to 7 minutes 21 seconds.

The output of the optimized script is identical to the original one.

Intro

As the title suggest, I had a customer asking for a list of all email addresses within the company and the accompanying mailbox sizes.