The Multifunctioning DBA » Automation

Exchange Email Changes (Users)

Colin Smith — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Last time we went through and got a list of all the mailboxes and out put all smtp addreses to $comparefile. This time we need to get all of the ad records that are associated with the same OU. Now to do this you need the quest ad tools. At least that is how I did it. So here we go, this is pretty easy.

$users = get-qaduser -service ms.contoso.microsoft.com -resultsize 0

So that line is not to tough and here is what it does. The -service switch will tell it what OU I want it to look in and this will include all child containers from that level. -ResultSize 0 just tells it to get them all without limiting how many results I get. So this gives me a list of all the user accounts that I am going to be dealing with and these user accounts should correspond with the mailbox info that I have already gathered.

Powershell Script to modify thousands of email records

Colin Smith — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:13:49 +0000

Like I said I have been tasked with a project to make thousands of modifications to our email addresses at my company. The rules are pretty complex and the Exchange Admin said that because it is not really a blanket thing that a policy will not help us. Good news for me though, now I get to do a powershell script that will determine who needs what changes if any and apply the changes. First thing I needed to do was get the exchange management tools installed on my workstation. I did not want to be writing my code in notepad or something on the server that has the tools installed. I want to use my IDE and have access to all the cmd-lets that I need. In this case that is the exchange tools and the Quest AD cmd-lets. You can get Exchange stuff here and the Quest stuff here. Then I had to make sure that I could manage the exchange objects. Both gather information and modify when I need to. I will continue this series later. First get everything installed and we will go from there.

AD Audit in Powershell

Colin Smith — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:37:58 +0000

I have mentioned this before but I have finally done what I set out to do and re-wrote my old vbscript that audits AD Accounts based on Create Date and Last LogonDate in Powershell. This is another great example of how much better powershell is and why everyone should now it. My VB Script was just under 800 lines of code and that was without many comments that documented the process. Now I feel that documenting scripts is very important. This is because I have had to try to fix other peoples scripts when they did not document it well and it is not fun. My powershell version of the same script with added functionality as well as over 100 lines of comments is only just over 400 lines. That means that I was able to remove about 500 lines of actual code from the script as well as add functionality to the script.
I will break the script down and post each one of the functions with a good explanation of each in my next few posts. It is a very cool script and it could be added to and customized to fit any situation that you may need. My version is based on my companies policy of disabling an account after 90 days of inactivity and deleting the account after 180 days of inactivity. My company runs the script weekly and the script sends out emails about the accounts that have been disabled and deleted to the needed personal so that the appropriate paperwork can be completed for those accounts. The script is soon to be posted. I am still testing but I will have it very soon.

Powershell Profile

Colin Smith — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:00:05 +0000

The Powershell Profile is a script that druns anytime you launch Powershell. This is handy so you can ste up variables, add snapins, or just do what ever you like or think is cool when launching Powershell. I was just editing mine, which you can do by:

notepad $profile

This will pull up your profile so you can edit the script. If you would like to know where the script is located then just do a $profile to get the full path. Anyway after I edited my profile I wanted to reload the profile so that all the new things I just added would be available in my current powershell session. Like most things in Powershell this is simple.

. $profile

This will re-run the profile script and now all your new goodies are available