Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

Category: PowerShell

  • PowerShell: Looking up specific user properties

    Many of my customers use specific properties for various things. Most users do not have ADUC installed, and some of our customers even disallow installation of ADUC on end user computers. I recently had a user ask about looking up the contents of a specific attribute (extensionAttribute6, in case you were wondering).

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  • PowerShell: Find many users using their name

    Last week, I showed you how I looked up a single user in Active Directory, using the Get-ADUser cmdlet. I noted that I had an issue with finding some users due to spelling errors. This wasn’t a problem when I was doing them individually, but I soon found myself needing to do the same for more than a hundred users.

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  • PowerShell: Find User based on partial name

    Some time ago, I needed to look up the account names of a handful of users in Active Directory. The information I had beforehand was their names. I did not have ADUC available to me, but I did have PowerShell. This is an excellent use case for the Get-ADUser cmdlet when combined with the -Filter parameter. Here’s what my first stab at the problem looked like this:

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  • PowerShell: Finding host name from IP address

    In tech support, resolving IP addresses to host names can be something you do on a relatively frequent basis. While I’ve always used the CLI ping command with the -a option, I have also been working towards higher proficiency in PowerShell. Frankly, for a single IP address, I prefer sticking with CLI. When working with a number of addresses, however, it gets a lot more interesting.

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  • PowerShell: Default properties

    Last week, when describing how to return specific properties, I mentioned that the command returns some standard properties, which is why I didn’t have to specify that it should get the Displayname for the members of the group. What properties are by default returned for the commonly used commands?

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  • PowerShell: Return multiple specific properties

    The script I described a few weeks ago for finding all members of several groups is serving me very well indeed. I was recently asked to provide both the display name and the login name for each member in the group. This was readily achieved by modifying the script slightly. The rest of the script remains the same, so I will leave that well enough alone, and start with the following snippet: Get-ADGroupMember $Group -recursive | Get-ADUser -property Displayname | select Displayname

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  • PowerShell: “Some or all identity references could not be translated”

    For a whole host of reasons we use scripts to create access controlled file shares, and to create the Active Directory groups that control access to them. Not only is it easier than doing it manually, it also ensures that the group is created in the correct place, that permissions are set correctly, and that it follows our naming convention. It helps prevent errors and improve the quality of our work, as well as allowing us to push the task right out to our tier one techs, as I described when discussing the ticket cost funnel a while back.

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  • Powershell: A script to find all members of several groups refined

    One of the scripts that I use most often is the one I wrote about back in September of 2019. Usually, I only run it for up to ten or so groups, so it’s not a big problem to simply swap out the group name, rince and repeat. Recently, however, I needed to run it for more than five hundred groups. The sheer amount of data makes that a very different proposition.

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  • Powershell: Add user to multiple groups

    A while back, I had a user that had to be added to a large number (150+) of active directory groups. Rather than doing so manually, I spent a little time looking up how to automate it, and created a script to help me do it. Here’s how I constructed it:

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  • PowerShell: Find all groups containing a specific string

    Sometimes, you need a list of all groups whose name contain a specific string, whether that is in the beginning, middle, or end of the group name. As we’ve seen previously, looking up groups in PowerShell is done with the Get-ADGroup command. Adding the -filter parameter allows us to find groups that satisfy our needs. Using asterisks as wildcards, we can specify whether the string should be at the start, middle, or end:

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  • PowerShell: Check Remote Computer Disk Capacity

    From time to time, I get tickets where one of many possible root causes may be a full disk. While accessing this information over RDP is often an option, it is rather more intrusive than needed. What’s more, I usually don’t have access to access file servers over RDP. Enter PowerShell and the get-WmiObject query!

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