Category: 7866

This automated several administrative tasks at our service desk.  It reportedly saved 10% of our full FTE count.  Also, it significantly improved documentation by making Tech actions cut-and-paste-able:

Service Desk Documentation and Support Tool

 

With every view that is build using Live Maps an OpsMgr group is created containing all the objects that are on the Live Maps view. You can use these groups for different purposes, for example target the group for security, reporting, service level tracking or for setting maintenance mode.

In this article it will give a few code examples to extract information about Live Maps groups using Powershell.

How-To: List Live Maps group information using Powershell

 

I was wondering today if it would be possible to create an Update Search Folder in Powershell. Turns out you can but it isn’t as straight forward as you might think. According to the SCCM SDK Search Folders are an instance of the SMS_ObjectContainerNode class

Project84 – Powershell, SCCM and Search Folders

 

Before I became a “Deployment Guy”, I used to be an “Active Directory Guy” and worked on quite a few Active Directory deployments and migrations.  When users, groups, and computers are migrated to a new domain, the resources (files, shares, user profiles, etc.) need to have the permissions on them changed so that the migrated accounts can access them as before.  If users/groups are migrated before the resources, they can be migrated with SID History (the SID of the old accounts are placed in the sIDHistory attribute of the new account) to allow access to resources before the “security translation” of permissions is completed.

The Deployment Guys : Creating a SID Mapping File with Windows PowerShell

 

In any virtualized environment, adding new VMs is a frequent operation. While backup administrators can protect an entire Hyper-V host using the DPM Management Console, the protection group had to be modified manually to include the new virtual machines that have come up on the Hyper-V host. These scripts are expected to work with DPM 2010 Beta. By using them, you should be able to quickly put together a script that can enable the auto protection of your hyper-v hosts. Note: These scripts work on an existing protection group and do not create a fresh protection group. The attached scripts automate the task of adding any new virtual machines recognized in the Hyper-V hosts protected by the DPM server into existing protection groups. There are different scripts for Hyper-V clusters (AddNewClusteredVM.ps1) and standalone Hyper-V hosts (AddNewStandAloneVM.ps1). You would still use the script for standalone servers to automatically protect the non-clustered virtual machines of any Hyper-V host that is part of a cluster.

Download details: DPM 2010 PowerShell Script – Hyper-V Auto-Protection

 

With the recent release of Windows PowerShell v.2 and the immanent publication of our well regarded Windows PowerShell v.2 TFM book by Don Jones and Jeff Hicks, SAPIEN is releasing our Windows PowerShell v.1 TFM eBook as a FREE download to the public. Even though this eBook is for version 1 of PowerShell, the book still contains loads of valuable information about PowerShell’s core workings and cmdlets. Download the eBook today at http://www.primaltools.com/downloads/communitytools/. Just look for the entry entitled “Powershell TFM V1 eBook”.

SAPIEN Technologies » Blog Archive » Free Windows PowerShell ebook

 

The number of cmdlets in Windows PowerShell 2.0 has nearly doubled over the number that shipped with the original product. These are core cmdlets and do not take into account the number of cmdlets that are included with Windows 7.0. Many of these cmdlets are for use with remoting, and the underlying WSMan technology. On a Windows 7 computer with Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) installed, there are 456 cmdlets. On a Windows 7 computer with all modules loaded, but without RSAT installed, there are 251 cmdlets. On a Windows 7 computer without the modules loaded there are 236 cmdlets. On a computer with Windows PowerShell 1.0 installed and with no snap-ins installed, there are 129 cmdlets.

Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog : Hey, Scripting Guy! What Are the New Cmdlets in Windows PowerShell 2.0?

I concocted this batch file script a couple weeks ago to determine where a client was accessing the network from and then mapping shares accordingly.  In this instance, folks were logging in through either Citrix of the local LAN.  If they were logging on by way of the LAN, the DFS shares needed to be mapped.  If logging on through Citrix, they needed to log on directly to the shares, instead of the DFS replicas.

I did this based on the IP address of the Gateway obtained through the connection.  As you can see the Gateway changed based on the location, so it was easy to determine where they client was logging in from.  There’s also another section in the script so that a VPN or “other” connection can be added to the logic, too.

To use the script just spot the IP Gateway address fields (XXX for one Gateway, YYY for the other) and modify based on the IP Gateway addresses assigned in your organization.

 

rem Subnets for reference
rem Citrix Gateway: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
rem Server Gateway: YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY
rem Grab IP address and dump to a file

ipconfig >"%userprofile%\ipconfig.txt"

echo Checking for your location

rem Seaching for default gateway in IP dump above
findstr "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX" "%userprofile%\ipconfig.txt"
if not errorlevel 1 goto Citrix

echo Not Citrix
goto next

:next
findstr "YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY" "%userprofile%\ipconfig.txt"
if not errorlevel 1 goto Server

echo not Server
goto other

:Citrix

net use G: \\server\share
net use P: \\server\share
net use Z: \\server\share
net time \\timeserver /set /y

goto :next

:Server

net use G: \\DFS_ROOT\share
Net use P: \\DFS_ROOT\share
net use Z: \\DFS_ROOT\share
net time \\timeserver /set /y

goto :next

:other
rem Other settings (for VPN etc)
goto :next

:next

rem more commands

:end

 

Finding our console growing with numerous collections and advertisements related to single-instance software distributions to a named device, I wanted a process to follow that would permit automated “cleansing” of the console. The script should not only remove the collections, but also the associated advertisements

SCCM Script to Delete Specific Collections and Associated Advertisements | System Center Guide

Available on myITforum.com, of course.

Its available for download from the Scripting downloads page:

http://www.myitforum.com/downloads/default.asp?w=3&se=Scripting

 

Or, grab it with this direct download link:

KiXtart 2010 4.61 RC2