Author Archives: Uma Yellapragada

Active Directory with PowerShell

Happy to to share with all my blog readers that we have authored a book named “Active Directory with PowerShell“ published by Packt Publishers.

This book acts as a complete guide that will unleash the power of automation in Active Directory environment. Also helps you to

  • Create and manage domains, organization units, sites, and IP subnets using PowerShell
  • Learn advanced operations in Active directory such as promoting, demoting active directory domain controllers, recovering AD objects, and working with replication using PowerShell

Insight

The book starts with an overview of the components, software, and modules required to manage Active Directory with PowerShell. It then moves on to help you create and manage users, computer accounts, and group policies with simple examples to automate daily tasks. Furthermore, it covers topics such as GPOs, DNS Server/Client, DFS-N, and DFS-R automation. It also demonstrates how to automate some advanced operations so that they can be scripted to perform in a faster and more efficient way. By the end of this book, you will be competent enough to use PowerShell to manage your Active Directory environment and will gain all the required knowledge to automate your daily operations.

Take-Aways

  • Manage user and computer accounts using PowerShell
  • Automate group membership additions, removals, and bulk operations using PowerShell
  • Perform various query operations against Active Directory to fetch user, computer, and group details in an efficient and faster way
  • Understand how sites, subnets, and domains are managed
  • Perform advanced operations such as Domain Controller promotion/demotion
  • Discover how to automate replication checks, fine grained password policy creation, and FSMO roles transfer/seize using PowerShell
  • Get to know more about DNS server management, record creation/modification/ deletion, and DNS client management with PowerShell
  • Find out ways to automate DFS-N and DFS-R installation and configuration using PowerShell

How to get this book?

https://www.packtpub.com/networking-and-servers/active-directory-powershell

Advertisement

PowerShell-2

In this article, let’s see what PowerShell modules are and how they help system administrators & developers in automation of regular and routine tasks.

Here is the typical definition of a module

A module is a set of related Windows PowerShell functionalities that can be dynamic or persist on disk. Modules that persist on disk are referenced, loaded, and persisted as script modules, binary modules, or manifest modules. Unlike snap-ins, the members of these modules can include cmdlets, providers, functions, variables, aliases, and much more.

There are different types of PowerShell Modules like

  • Script Modules
  • Binary Modules
  • Manifest Modules
  • Dynamic Modules

You can go through this MSDN LINK for more detailed description of different PowerShell modules

In simple terms a module is nothing but a kind of header library as in C programming. Each module contains different set of cmdlets to perform different actions based on the application used.

So, before we want to use/manage the application from PowerShell it is required to import/save/store the module files/binaries in local disk or a shared drive.  These modules can be stored in user’s My documents or system root drive where PowerShell is installed.

user\documents\windowspowershell\modules\mymodule

windows\system32\windowspowershell\V1.0\modules\mymodule

Remember, you need to have administrator privileges to store in system root folder. Here are few commands

Import-Module – Use this command to import any module into PowerShell session.

Get-Module – Lists out the information of all modules that have been or that can be imported to current PowerShell session.

Remove-Module – Removes module from current PowerShell session.

Before installing/importing any module the execution policy have to be set as unrestricted in the PowerShell session.

ExecutionPolicy

To list out the existing modules in the library,

PowerShell_ModulesList

So, you can directly import any of the existing modules by using import-module cmdlets. But in case you want to import any other module, you need to first download and copy to the any of the folders mentioned above.

In next article let’s learn few basic cmdlets and start writing small scripts.

Happy Learning !!!

 Link to first article