It’s been a while, but I’ve kept myself busy in the meantime. During my last post on my blog, I was waiting for an assignment at my new job at OSC, only to be presented with a new challenge which kept me from posting for a while [expect more posts soon!!].

In the meantime I had also agreed to provide small training/demo session on PowerShell along with my new colleague Danny den Braver, to show people how awesome it actually is, while even showing them some PowerShell on Linux things [a few Linux guys there 🙂 ].

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.

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
}

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.

I’m loving the way Microsoft is currently pushing PowerShell as THE go-to tool required to manage all your solutions.

I’m at a loss however at why they aren’t providing out of the box solutions so that you can manage all of your workstations/servers through PowerShell. Sure, you can head over to every machine and configure PowerShell using

Enable-PSRemoting

However I can understand that people have better things to do with their time [I sure do!]