New cmdlets to manage AD computer accounts

Up to version 1.3, we used to have one cmdlet for computer accounts (namely Get-QADComputer) – now we have 6:

• Get-QADComputer
• New-QADComputer
• Set-QADComputer
• Enable-QADComputer
• Disable-QADComputer
• Reset-QADComputer

You can kind of guess what they do by their names, but let’s quickly go through them one by one and give a few quick examples.

• Get-QADComputer

Retrieves AD computer account objects based on the criteria you specify. E.g. (anyone still running Vista? )

Get-QADComputer spb* -OSName 'Windows Vista*' | Format-Table Name, ManagedBy

• New-QADComputer

Creates new computer account in AD (does not join the actual computer though) and sets the attributes you specify:

New-QADComputer -Name 'LAB-SRV3' -SamAccountName 'LAB-SRV3' -ParentContainer 'CN=Computers,DC=lab,DC=local' -Location 'AMS/HQ/Building A'

• Set-QADComputer

Modifies AD computer account properties (can work in bulk when you pipe Get-QADComputer output into this one).

Set-QADComputer 'quest.local/computers/Comp4' -ManagedBy 'QUEST\DSotnikov'

or

Get-QADComputer spb* | Set-QADComputer -Location 'St. Petersburg'

• Enable-QADComputer
• Disable-QADComputer

Enable or disable one or multiple computer accounts:

Enable-QADComputer 'CN=LAB-SRV1,CN=Computers,DC=dom,DC=local'

or

Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot 'dom.local/labComputers' | Disable-QADComputer

• Reset-QADComputer

Reset a computer account in Active Directory. When resetting a computer account, you reset the secure channel between the computer that uses that account to join the domain and a domain controller in the domain.Resetting a computer account breaks that computer’s connection to the domain and requires it to rejoin the domain.

Reset-QADComputer 'CN=LAB-SRV1,CN=Computers,DC=dom,DC=local'

More information can be found in AD cmdlets online reference and PDF guide. Download the new AD cmdlets now and let us know what you think by posting to the AD PowerShell discussion forum!

AD Cmdlets 1.3 RTMed

Late last week we released to the web the latest version (1.3) of our free Active Directory cmdlets (also known as QAD-cmdlets, widely used by tens of thousands admins and compatible with more or less any version of Active Directory or ADAM/ADLDS).

You can read more about the cmdlets in this PDF guide, or online reference.

This is a significant update with some 14 new cmdlets, 24 new parameters, 43 enhanced ones, and a few bugs fixed (not that we had any really )

Detailed What’s New information can be found on page 19 of the PDF guide and in my upcoming blog posts. Download the new AD cmdlets now and let us know what you think by posting to the AD PowerShell discussion forum!

And the winner is PowerGUI

Remember that weird Windows IT Pro contest in which they put PowerGUI against gmail, iTunes, and a thousand other free and open source products?

Well, the funniest part is – thanks to your support – we won the silver award in that huge category!

Here’s what the magazine had to say (and with which I happily agree!):

“There are a lot of PowerShell scripting and GUI tools on the market these days, but PowerGUI remains one of the best, and it’s free!” —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro

And my congratulations to 14 other product teams from Quest winning in multiple other categories – great job by everyone and a reminder of the comprehensiveness of the product set we have here:

In Windows It Pro’s Community Choice Awards:

• Gold for Authentication Services (Best Interoperability Product),
• Silver for Group Policy Manager/GPOAdmin^® (Best Active Directory and Group Policy Product),
• Bronze for ChangeAuditor^® (Best Auditing and Compliance Product).

Quest’s database management solutions received SQL Server Magazine Editors’ Best Awards recognition in two categories:

• Best Backup & Recovery (SQL Server) Product: LiteSpeed^® for SQL Server (Gold)
• Best Development SQL Server Tool: Toad^® for SQL Server (Gold)

Quest also was recognized by the editors at Windows IT Pro in the following categories:

• Best Free or Open Source IT Tool: PowerGUI^™ (Silver)
• Best Auditing & Compliance Product: ChangeAuditor^® (Silver)
• Best Interoperability Product: Authentication Services (Bronze)
• Best Systems Management Product: GPOAdmin^® (Bronze)

Quest’s Windows management products also received nods from the readers of Redmond and SQL Server Magazine. In the Redmond Readers’ Choice Awards:

• Quest Migration Manager received both the “ISV Winner” and “Preferred Product” in the Best Migration Product category.
• Quest Defender was recognized as a “Preferred Product” in the Best Smart Card/Biometric/Two-Factor Authentication System category.

SQL Server Magazine and Windows IT Pro’s Community Choice Awards named:

• Site Administrator for SharePoint the gold award winner for Best SharePoint Product.

SQL Server Magazine’s Community Choice Awards gave:

• Quest’s Foglight^® Performance Analysis for SQL Server the silver for Best Database Monitoring and Performance Products, and
• Spotlight^® on SQL Server Enterprise was named a “Preferred Product” by Redmond Readers’ Choice Awards.

PowerShell Dinner at TechEd Europe

Aleksandar has just posted the pictures he took at the PowerShell community dinner in Berlin on November 11.

PowerShell Dinners are amazingly fun community events we have more or less at each major Microsoft conference and which gather members of the PowerShell team at Microsoft, MVPs, vendors in the PowerShell ecosystem, and just active members of the PowerShell community.

Unfortunately, this year not everyone could make it to TechEd. However, still, chances are that this photo album will show you a few faces behind the names you come across every day of your PowerShell life.

Systems Management with NetPoint and PowerGUI

Need a simple and affordable way to manage your Windows systems in batch? Shannon Ma from NetPoint has just posted a free PowerPack which integrates with NetPoint PowerShell interfaces and lets you easily inventory your network.

The PowerPack can work with both free and commercial version of NetPoint (guess, which one gives you more functionality ) and provides a great way to collect various information from computers on your network, as well as install/unistall software, do restarts, run commands, and so on – all in all about 30 various tasks:

Read more, leave your feedback and download the PowerPack here.

Is IIS 7 Console Based on PowerShell?

Now it is. However, this is not the native management console coming with IIS, but a free PowerPack which Adam Murray posted here.

Not only you can see (and modify) the PowerShell code behind everything the tool is doing, you will enjoy just using the console and all the great features it has, including for example:

• Create, rename, copy and delete application pools
• Configure all app pool properties
• Create, rename, copy and delete web sites
• Create, rename, copy and delete ftp sites
• Set various site properties
• View and manage worker processes
• View and manage IIS services
• Manage site bindings
• Creates the various enum types from the IIS schema to allow the use of dropdowns for configuring properties

To learn about all its features, see screenshots and download the actual tool go to the IIS 7 powerpack page.

And don’t forget about other great PowerPacks Adam have created in the past for WebSphere MQ and SQL Reporting Services PowerPack.

3 days left to submit your PowerPack

What are you waiting for? Install PowerGUI, watch this video, follow this tutorial, create the PowerPack of your dream and win one of the prizes!

This is really easy, fun, and a great way to have your own IT dreams (and dreams of many IT professionals out there in the community) come true.

The deadline is November 15. Details can be found here.

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!

PowerPack Creation Manual

Kirk has published a pretty extensive reference manual on PowerPacks (PowerGUI add-ons), what they are, how to customize them, and how to create the ones of your own.

Great timing considering that you still have 5 days to create a PowerPack and submit it to the PowerPack Challenge!

Check out the document here.

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
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