PowerShell UG – June meeting slides and recording
Published June 29, 2010Thanks to everyone how joined the Live Meeting this evening – especially for the questions 🙂
The slides and demo script are available for download from:
http://cid-43cfa46a74cf3e96.office.live.com/browse.aspx/PowerShell%20User%20Group/2010%20June
The recording of the session is available from:
Richard Siddaway has invited you to view a Microsoft Office Live Meeting recording.
View Recording
Recording Details
Subject: PowerShell and DNS
Recording URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/view
Recording ID: NPP98R
Attendee Key: Dj\J_)4}g
PowerShell User Group reminder
Published June 28, 2010
Don’t forget the PowerShell User Group Live Meeting – Tuesday 29 June @ 7.30 BST
Details from
http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/06/17/powershell-ug-meeting-dns.aspx
PowerShell and Visio – Documenting AD: 3
Published June 26, 2010Up to now we have been dealing with a single level of OUs. There are few AD implementations that don’t have child OUs so how do we deal with them.
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function Add-Domain {
param ( [string]$name ) $dom = $page.Drop($domain, 1, 11) $dom.Resize(1, 5, 70) $dom.Text = $name return $dom } function Add-Ou { $link = $page.Drop($dircon,1,$y) $visio = New-Object -ComObject Visio.Application ## use blank drawing ## set active page ## Add a stencil ## Add objects $file = "manticore.txt" $ous = Get-Content $file $dom = Add-Domain $domname $y = 11 foreach ($ou in $ous) { |
The difference here is in the way we handle the OUs. We get the parent of the OU we are working with. If the parent is the domain we link back to that as before. If its another OU we link to that.
A variable is created for every OU object in the diagram at the time we create it. We can then use get-variable to find the value of the variable to be our parent for linking
Listing all of the OUs in a domain
Published June 24, 2010In this post - http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/06/13/powershell-and-visio-documenting-ad-2.aspx – I showed how to start creating a diagram of the OU structure in your AD domain. In case you are wondering how to get a text file like the one I used check out PowerShell in Practice - http://www.manning.com/siddaway/ – especially Technique 103 on page 300
Extended properties
Published June 24, 2010In the last post I showed how to read the Extended Properties of a Visio stencil. But how do we know how which property to use?
We can adapt our script to list the possible Extended Properties
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$direc = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Visio Content\1033"
$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application" $folder = $shell.Namespace($direc) 0..300 | foreach { "$_ $($folder.GetDetailsOf($null,$_))"} |
On Windows 7 I counted 286 properties. Its a long scroll but you will find what you want.
Identifying Visio Stencils
Published June 24, 2010In the previous posts on using Visio I’ve shown how to load and use a particular stencil. But how do you know which stencil to use?
One way is to use Windows Explorer, hover the mouse over the stencil and read the Extended File Properties. That’s a bit manual so we’ll look at producing a list of stencils and for what they are used. To do this we can’t use PowerShell directly but this is where things get real easy – we can use the scripting shell just like we did with VBScript.
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$direc = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Visio Content\1033"
$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application" $folder = $shell.Namespace($direc) Get-ChildItem -Path $direc -Filter "*.vss" | foreach { |
Define the directory holding the Visio stencils – mine is Office 2010 on Windows 7.
Create an object for the shell and get the folder object using the Namespace method.
Jump back to PowerShell to run get-childitem on the folder using a filter of *.vss to restrict the output to stencils – always cheaper to filter at source.
We then use the Items() method of our folder to identify the file and use getdetailsof method to return the Title (Extended property number 21) of the stencil. The output is formatted using a .NET formatted string.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Chapter2
Published June 22, 2010The first and second chapters of my book on Untangling High Availability and Disaster Recovery is available from
http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/sgudb.php
Enjoy
PowerShell UG Meeting: DNS
Published June 17, 2010
When: Tuesday, Jun 29, 2010 7:30 PM (BST)
Where: Live Meeting webcast*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Meeting will cover DNS, DNS best practice analyser, DNS WMI provider and DNSShell cmdlets from codeplex
Notes
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PowerShell and Visio – Documenting AD: 2
Published June 13, 2010I’ve taken the script to add OUs to a drawing and modified it so that the addition is performed by a function.
I started with a text file containing some OUs
ou=England,dc=Maticore,dc=org
ou=Scotland,dc=Maticore,dc=org
ou=Wales,dc=Maticore,dc=org
ou=Ireland,dc=Maticore,dc=org
ou=Portugal,dc=Maticore,dc=org
ou=Belgium,dc=Maticore,dc=org
ou=Latvia,dc=Maticore,dc=org
Notice that they are all top level OUs – lets not get too ambitious!
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function Add-Domain {
param ( [string]$name ) $dom = $page.Drop($domain, 1, 11) $dom.Resize(1, 5, 70) $dom.Text = $name return $dom } function Add-Ou { $dom_ou = $page.Drop($dircon,1,$y) $visio = New-Object -ComObject Visio.Application ## use blank drawing ## set active page ## Add a stencil ## Add objects $file = "manticore.txt" $ous = Get-Content $file $dom = Add-Domain $domname $y = 11 foreach ($ou in $ous) { |
The functions add the domain and OU objects to the drawing. Only change is that I set the text property of the OU and domain.
The main body of the script creates the drawing as before. Uses the file name to get the domain and then reads the file. It splits out the OU names and calculates the Y co-ordinate then adds the OU
Next up I need to deal with child OUs
PowerShell and Visio – Documenting AD: 1
Published June 12, 2010If we take the concept of our last script that added objects to a drawing we can use this as the basis of a way to automate the documentation of our AD.
One of the first things we need to document is the OU structure. If you have ever produced one of these it is a tedious affair and they are difficult to maintain. So lets automate it.
This is how we create a basic OU structure.
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$visio = New-Object -ComObject Visio.Application
$docs = $visio.Documents ## use blank drawing ## set active page ## Add a stencil ## Add objects $dom = $page.Drop($domain, 1, 11) $ou1 = $page.Drop($ou, 1.5, 10.25) $ou2 = $page.Drop($ou, 1.5, 9.5) $dom_ou1 = $page.Drop($dircon,2,10.25) $dom_ou1 = $page.Drop($dircon,2,9.5) |
The basic changes from last time are that I’m starting with a blank drawing and adding the Active Directory stencil. Objects are added and resized as before. I’m also using the directory connector object rather than the default connector.
If you look at the positions of the objects you can see that I’m automatically aligning them in vertical columns by defining the X co-ordinate.
This script is OK as an experiment to discover how things work but we usually have a lot more objects than this and the depth of the child OUs needs to be considered. We need to be able to read in the OU data and move some of this activity into functions so we can reuse the code.
That’s the next job.