Essential Exchange

In my last post, Getting a List of Storage Groups in a PowerShell Script , you saw how to use the information from the Get-StorageGroup cmdlet to discover the particular disk volumes used by a storage group and to build a list of the files that were used by the storage group. Now, that list of files...

In Getting Our Computername in a PowerShell Script , you learned how to do just that - store the running computer name (the short NetBIOS name) into a PowerShell variable. At the same time, you learned WHY and HOW it worked. From this point forward, I'll presume that you've executed this particular...

The userAccountControl attribute, which resides on each user and computer object in an Active Directory forest, is responsible for, well, controlling lots of things about those accounts. For example it controls whether an account is locked out, or whether an account is disabled, or whether the password...

There are lots of reasons why you may want to get the name of your computer while you are executing a PowerShell script, from a parameter you want to pass to a cmdlet or function or for generating a filename. Thankfully, PowerShell makes it easy. Just like our old friend, cmd.exe, PowerShell makes the...

Next week, in Las Vegas, Nevada is the semiannual Connections conference. The Connections conference is a technical conference covering SQL Connections, Windows Connections, Exchange Connections, etc. There are lots of individual tracks, both for IT Pros and Devs. I'll be speaking next week at the...

This is just another quick sample of what you can do in PowerShell by leveraging the .Net framework. Need to access a website? No problem. System.Net.WebRequest to the rescue! Note that you can specify credentials, read all the data, follow the links, etc. Just depends on how far you want to go... function...

I'm in the process of tech-reviewing an important book (you'll want it on your shelf once it is released), and one of the things I did today was spend a while figuring out how to do Attribute Scoped Queries in PowerShell. If you develop in C# or C++, or use adfind to do your searches, those tools...

One of the mailing lists I read and occaisionally post on is named ActiveDir. A lot of heavy-hitters in the AD world hang-out around there. I've learned quite a bit by lurking there. A recent poster had wanted to create a few thousand accounts for testing purposes, and have them all follow a certain...

In March of 2006, I authored this blog post, Finding Services Using non-System Accounts , with the script being written in VBscript. Two years later, most of my environment is now in PowerShell. So, I've decided to update that post with the PowerShell equivalent. The VBscript version of the utility...

A number of parameters for EMS (the Exchange Management Shell - which is just PowerShell v1 plus the Exchange snap-ins) require the specification of a multivalued property. A multivalued property is just what it sounds like - a property that has multiple values. A very common one is the RemoteIPRanges...