Dmitry Sotnikov’s view on PowerShell, PowerGUI and everything he sees around
Just wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an amazingly Happy New Year! 2007 has been absolutely fantastic for us with both AD cmdlets and PowerGUI skyrocketing from first basic betas to featurerichness, great reviews and becoming tools used in real enterprise environments.
Thank you all for your participation in the community and for helping us build this great software! See you in 2008. 
(You’ve got the Christmas/New Year wallpaper from our team already, right?)
Next month TechNet Magazine is featuring PowerGUI in their Toolbox section.
Greg Steen has put together an excellent review of PowerGUI summarizing all the core functionality the tool has and as well as the usage scenarios for it.
Check out the review yourself – the online version is already live!
Tags: PowerGUI, PowerShell
We need your help and a couple of minutes of your time. Please go to this survey page and answer 5 simple questions on how you use PowerGUI today and where we should take it in the future.
As you know, our goal with PowerGUI is to keep it free (and as much as possible registration-free as well). However, we need information on how you are using it so we know where to concentrate our development efforts. This survey is one of the ways you can help us with that.
Finally, Quest and Microsoft are looking for joint case-study opportunities around PowerGUI and Windows Server 2008. If you may consider participating in one of those, please indicate it in the survey so we can follow-up and make you one of IT Heroes of tomorrow.
We really tried to keep the survey as short and straight-forward as possible, so we hope you can spare a minute or two on the survey page as a way to support our efforts on maintaining the free PowerGUI tool we all love and use. Thanks! 
Tags: Microsoft, PowerGUI, PowerShell, Quest Software, Windows Server 2008
We kind of kept sticking to the fashion of perpetual betas for quite some time now (since the first 1.0 beta released late March through the RC 1.0.5 this fall) and we feel that the product is now feature rich and stable enough for us to drop the beta label.
In the coming weeks I’ll blog more about the cmdlets features and the changes compared to the RC build but for now, here’s a quick list:
User account management:
Set-QADUser
Unlock-QADUser
Disable-QADUser
Deprovision-QADUser
Enable-QADUser
New-QADUser
Get-QADUserPlus a few common ones:
Move-QADObject
Rename-QADObject
Remove-QADObject
Group management:
Set-QADGroup
Get-QADGroup
New-QADGroup
Get-QADGroupMember
Add-QADGroupMember
Remove-QADGroupMemberMove, Rename, Remove obviously also apply:
Move-QADObject
Rename-QADObject
Remove-QADObject
Managing computer accounts:
Get-QADComputer
Set-QADObject
Move-QADObject
Rename-QADObject
Remove-QADObject
New-QADObject
OUs and other objects:
Set-QADObject
Move-QADObject
Rename-QADObject
Remove-QADObject
New-QADObject
Get-QADObject
Fine-Grained Password Policies:
New-QADPasswordSettingsObject
Get-QADPasswordSettingsObject
Add-QADPasswordSettingsObjectAppliesTo
Remove-QADPasswordSettingsObjectAppliesTo
Selecting DC/domain/ADAM instance/ARS proxy or supplying alternate credentials:
Connect-QADService
Disconnect-QADService
Auxiliary cmdlets to make life easier:
Convert-QADAttributeValue
Set-QADPSSnapinSettings
Set-QADPSSnapinSettings
It is more or less the same list we had in RC (with one new cmdlet and a few improvements and bugfixes in the others – and finally full PowerShell v2 compatibility ), but the EULA change alone (not a beta any more!) is probably worth making the upgrade all by itself!
And did I say that despite the RTM status AD cmdlets still remain free? Any reason for not going to the site right away and getting them?
Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, Password management, PowerShell, cmdlets
We’ve just got a great Christmas present which in the best traditions of the holiday we want to share.
Here’s a Christmas/New Year/Seasonal holiday present from Andrey (the author of the original PowerGUI wallpaper) – holiday edition of the wallpaper with snowflakes, Christmas tree, and the good old PowerGUI train.
Go get it from the PowerGUI downloads page – get yourself some of the holiday mood at your desktop!
Tags: Fun, PowerGUI, PowerShell
All those Set-* cmdlets are great at changing an attribute in AD, but how do you remove an attribute completely?
The answer is really straight-forward – you just set it to $null.
For example, to remove my City attribute I could use something like:
Set-QADUser "Dmitry Sotnikov" -City $null
In the general case of any attribute and any object use this syntax:
Set-QADObject identity –ObjectAttribute @{attributeName=$null}
Where identity is anything that can identify the object: samAccountName, DN, GUID, SID, canonical name; and attributeName is the name of the attribute you want to remove.
I guess this is one of those cases when the solution is so obvious you just forget to blog about it (until you get an IM from someone like xaegr asking )
Related topics:
Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, PowerShell
Platforma 2008 (aka TechEd Russia) team has just published the results of attendee surveys and the PowerShell session I did at the event got named the best of the show!
This is very exciting and a great honor for me. Microsoft Russia has done an incredible job putting together a great conference, so being named the best at an event like still feels a bit surreal.
Here’s the Russian Platforma 2008 results announcement, and an automated English translation.
Tags: Conferences, PowerShell, Russian, TechEd, Tech·Ed 2007
Finally I will always have great AD demo environments with no accounts named TestUser01 or alike. This is the outcome of the setting up test AD environments discussion we had this week. Darren and Rob suggested a couple of tricks on duplicating AD to a test lab, and xaegr provided a great link to US census information data on the most frequently used names, as well as a sample script I am re-using and enhancing below.
I basically took what xaegr suggested, added other properties to user accounts (first name, last name, city, department), and added code creating global security groups for each department and adding users into the groups. Here goes the code:
################################################ # Script to provision demo AD labs # (c) Dmitry Sotnikov, xaegr # Requires AD cmdlets ################################################ # Add AD cmdlets (should be downloaded from # http://www.quest.com/activeroles_server/arms.aspx # and installed on the local workstation # the script assumes the workstation is a part of the domain Add-PSSnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue # set folder in which the data files are located # this folder should contain files from # http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html # as well as cities.txt and departments.txt with the # lists of cities and departments for the lab cd c:\demofiles # set OU for demo accounts $OU = "ps64.local/test" # number of accounts to generate $num = 100 # read name files $last = Get-Content dist.all.last | select -First 1000 $firstm = Get-Content dist.male.first | select -First 100 $firstf = Get-Content dist.female.first | select -first 100 # extract the names $last = $last | where {$_ -match "^(\S+)"}|foreach-object {$matches[1]} $firstf = $firstf | where {$_ -match "^(\S+)"}|foreach-object {$matches[1]} $firstm = $firstm | where {$_ -match "^(\S+)"}|foreach-object {$matches[1]} # read department and city info $cities = Get-Content Cities.txt $depts = Get-Content Departments.txt # set up random number generator $rnd = New-Object System.Random function New-RandomADUser { # pick a male or a female first name if($rnd.next(2) -eq 1) { $fn = $firstm[$rnd.next($firstm.length)] } else { $fn = $firstf[$rnd.next($firstf.length)] } # random last name $ln=$last[$rnd.next($last.length)] # Set proper caps $ln = $ln[0] + $ln.substring(1, $ln.length - 1).ToLower() $fn = $fn[0] + $fn.substring(1, $fn.length - 1).ToLower() # random city and department $city = $cities[$rnd.next($cities.length)] $dept = $depts[$rnd.next($depts.length)] # Create and enable a user if ( ( Get-QADUser -SamAccountName ($fn.substring(0,1) + $ln) ) -eq $null ) { New-QADUser -Name "$fn $ln" -SamAccountName ($fn.substring(0,1) + $ln) ` -ParentContainer $OU -City $city -Department $dept ` -UserPassword "P@ssw0rd" -FirstName $fn -LastName $ln ` -DisplayName "$fn $ln" -Description "$city $dept" -Office $city ` | Enable-QADUser } } # Create 100 users 1..$num | ForEach-Object { New-RandomADUser } # Create groups for each department Get-QADUser -SearchRoot $OU | Group Department | ForEach-Object { New-QADGroup -Name $_.Name -SamAccountName $_.Name -ParentContainer $OU } # Add users to the groups based on their departments Get-QADUser -SearchRoot $OU | Add-QADGroupMember -Identity { $_.Department }
The files for names can be found on the census page, the files for cities and departments I was using are attached (note that to increase probability of a certain department or city you just need to duplicate it a few times in the file) as well as the script code:
Let me know if there’s anything else you need for your demo environments!
Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, Demo, PowerShell
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