PowerShell-Based console for SMS 2003

Are you running Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 and want to have it fully scriptable in PowerShell?

Check out this wonderful SMS/ConfigMgr PowerPack David Moravec put together.

It lets you browse all your SMS configuration and among other things:

• List members of collection
• See package properties
• See programs inside the package
• See distribution points where the package is replicated
• Refresh package on distribution points
• See advertisements assigned to colection
• See your site structure in dynamic nodes (as tree)
• Reports listed by specific categories
• Go to some predefined web pages (e.g. myITforum.com)
• See overall health of your site

And as always with PowerPacks – this one shows all the PowerShell code behind it, lets you customize and tweak it, gives bulk operations, filtering, reporting aand so on!

Download the pack from here and let David know what you think!

Are you also into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier? Go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

New enterprise PKI management console

Certificate management used to be tough. There have not been a single tool to manage all the aspects of it and administrators had to launch all these certsrv.msc, certtmpl.msc, certutil.exe, ocsp.msc, pkiview.msc, and so on. We had no bulk operations, had to manage each certificate authority (CA) in a separate MMC snapin, and so on.

That is now all a thing in the past with the new PowerGUI/PowerShell-based certificate management admin console created by PowerShell MVP Vadims Podāns (here’s English translation of his blog) and shared for free here.

Here’s a very quick summary of some of the features his tool has:

• Certificate Authorities management:
  • CRL Distribution Points (CDP)
  • Authority Information Access (AIA) settings
  • Review CRLs
  • Publish new CRLs
  • Change CRL publishing periods including overlap settings
  • Revoked Certificates
  • Issued Certificates
  • Pending requests
  • Failed requests
  • Issued certificate templates
  • Revoke/unrevoke certificates
  • Issue or deny pending requests for certificates
  • Add/remove certificate templates to issue
  • Change CRL/CRT/OCSP URL priorities
• Local certificate store management:
  • Import/Export certificates using various certificate types (such CER/pkcs12/pkcs7/SST)
  • Copy/move certificates between stores
  • Delete certificate from store
  • Validate certificates passing them through certificate chaining engine
  • Sign files
• Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Responders management
  • Review and change OCSP Responder settings
  • Change OCSP URL priorities

All of these support bulk operations, filtering, and reporting. All are available with their source PowerShell code for your reference and scripting.

Could you ask for more? Please submit your feedback to Vadims – this will help him improve the pack.

Read more about the pack, see the screenshots, and download the tool here.

Are you also into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier – go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

Tags: Certificate Authority, Certificate Management, PKI, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

Virtu-Al PowerPack – A must-have tool for VMware

PowerPack Challenge 2009 got its first contestant and it is absolutely fantastic.

If you are an administrator managing VMware infrastructure – this is a great free addition to your arsenal. Just look at the screenshot of the navigation tree. The tool is just an amazing collection of super-useful reports on VMware hosts, guest machines, datacenter, resource pools and clusters, and goes beyond that by adding licensing information and even a virtualization tip of the day!

You can download Alan’s PowerPack here. Read more about the pack and send your feedback here.

Good thing there’s more than one prize for the contest. So if you are into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier – go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

PowerPack Challenge: The Winning Strategy

Post early and actively collect and incorporate feedback – and you can substantially increase your chances of winning the first prize in the PowerPack Challenge 2009.

Here’s how Jonathan Medd got his Best PowerPack award last year (in 2008):

1. He posted his Exchange 2003 PowerPack really early when the contest was only starting.
2. The pack got tons of interest, was featured in podcasts and blogs, and Jonathan received a lot of feedback and even contributions from Shay and Aleksandar.
3. He kept incorporating feedback and contributions throughout the contest.
4. By the contest deadline, his PowerPack got well ahead of more recent entries in both quality and feature richness.

So if you have something in the works – be agile. Go ahead and post it. Tell the world, get feedback, and keep improving what you’ve got.

Read more about the contest here. Participate, have fun, win great prizes!

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

PowerPack Challenge 2009 Begins

Win $1000 and become a rockstar by creating a PowerPack and sharing it with the community!

PowerPacks are open-source PowerShell add-ons for PowerGUI Admin Console. PowerGUI.org Library has about 60 of them giving you customizable extensible user interfaces (and PowerShell libraries) to manage systems ranging from Exchange to Operations Manager, from VMware to Skype, from Twitter to Facebook.

Each year we are holding a competition and giving away prizes ($1000 to 2 winners, and $500 to the first runner up) to the most active participants and best PowerPacks.

PowerPack Challenge started this week and will last till November 15.

The judges this year include:

• Osama Said, Microsoft Corporation – PowerShell Team Blog
• Marco Shaw, PowerShell MVP – Marco’s Blog
• Jeffery Hicks, PowerShell MVP – Jeffery’s Blog
• Shay Levy, PowerShell MVP – Shay’s Blog
• Dmitry Sotnikov, Quest Software, PowerShell MVP – Dmitry’s Blog
• Kirk Munro, Quest Software, PowerShell MVP – Kirk’s Blog

And with the popularity of PowerGUI, this contest is not only a great scripting challenge , but is also an incredible way to bring value to thousands of administrators world-wide.

If you are interested in the submissions we had last year and who became the winners in 2008 – you can read the last posts here.

1. So think about the IT systems you manage and how you can make this management easier.
2. Read the contest details at the PowerPack Challenge web page.
3. Submit your PowerPack.
4. Win the prizes and become a rock star!

PowerPack Challenge Results

Susan has just posted the results of the second (and the final) sprint of the PowerPack Challenge 2008, and the winners are…

The Second Most Active participant (and a proud owner of $250 Amazon certificate) is Adam Murray for his WebSphere MQ management PowerPack. As I have already blogged, this is an impressive console putting your SOA deployments under total PowerShell control.

Both the Most Active Participant and the Best PowerPack prizes ($500 each – $1000 in total) go to… Jason Archer for his incredible Terminal Services PowerPack – a must for any TS deployment.

Finally, Jonathan Medd’s WSUS PowerPack definitely deserves a special mention. It didn’t won any prize this time (competition was tough!) but is a very useful tool worth checking out!

Congratulations to everyone! And as a reminder: these and a few dozen of other PowerPacks are freely available for download from the ever growing PowerGUI Library – check it out!

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

Terminal Services PowerPack

If I had to compile a list of areas generating the most requests in our community discussion forums Terminal Services and everything related to them would definitely make it to top 10.

This is why I was really excited to see Jason posting his Terminal Services PowerPack to the PowerGUI library.

Let me quote from Jason’s PowerPack page:

With this PowerPack, you can also view the Terminal Service settings on remote computer and the live RDP sessions on remote computers or the local machine. While viewing the live sessions, you can interact with them by sending a message to the user, shadowing the connection, take over the connection, or disconnect the session in various ways.

[For administrators,] This PowerPack allows basic administration of Termial Servers (view settings, permissions, enable/disable connections), RDP sessions (message, connect to, disconnect) and RDP connections (launch, edit settings). Additionally, administrators can immediately launch an RDP connection to a ADComputer they may be viewing in PowerGUI.

And a few screenshots:

Browse through connection files and tweak any RDP setting

Manage any sessions currently established for a terminal server

Download the PowerPack here.

WebSphere MQ PowerPack

Let’s continue reviewing the stars of the PowerPack Challenge contest:

Adam Murray (creator of the SQL Reporting Services PowerPack) has turned into a serial innovator by submitting yet another PowerPack – this time for IBM’s WebSphere MQ. If you are into IBM-based SOA architectures (and with 10,000 organizations using the product you might well be) this might be a big deal for you!

Adam’s pack helps you perform various queue management activities such as:

• Work with Queues, Channels, Services, Processes, Name Lists and Listeners
• You can create and delete items
• Set properties of items
• Send test messages
• Clear queues
• Start/Stop processes, services, channels and listeners

The pack is using the WebSphere MQ – Windows Powershell Library which you might remember being highlighted by Jeffrey on the PowerShell blog late last year.

Install the cmdlets, PowerGUI, and grab Adam’s PowerPack here.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

PowerShell for WSUS

Jonathan Medd has just shared another cool PowerPack – this time providing a great set of scripts for Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

His pack includes scripts to get information on almost every aspect of WSUS deployment: servers, configuration, email notifications, databases, target computers, updates, approvals, download progress and much more.

At the moment the PowerShell scripts in the pack are mostly just reporting the data, but it looks like Jonathan is adding stuff as we speak. He has just uploaded a newer version with the Start-Synchronisation action added – kicking off a manual Synchronization against Windows Update or the Upstream WSUS server.

Download the pack and keep an eye on the changes Jonathan is posting.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell, WSUS
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |

PowerPack Challenge Countdown

It’s just 2 weeks left before the PowerPack Challenge is over and now is the time to start working on your entries if you have not started the project yet! Just export a cool pack from PowerGUI, submit it to the challenge and you are in.

I would highly recommend that you resist the temptation to hold your cards closed till the very last moment (can you tell I am in Vegas this week? ) As the first sprint demonstrated, submitting earlier helps get the community involved, so you get extra hands/eyes/heads helping you make your pack better and ultimately to win the prizes – Jonathan submitted his Exchange 2003 pack pretty early in the first sprint and walked away with the $500 prize as result!

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |