[PS] C:>$password = Read-Host “Enter the password” -AsStringString
[PS] C:>foreach ($number in 1..100) { new-mailbox -name user$number -Alias user$number -database “MBX1SG1S1” -organizationalUnit “SPDOMAIN.COM/INDIA/Users” -UserPrincipalName user$number@spdomain.com -Displayname User$number -password $password }

http://blogs.technet.com/timmcmic/archive/2009/08/12/i-accidentally-deleted-an-exchange-2007-clustered-resource-what-should-i-do.aspx

Below powershell code helps you to list the files which are greater than given size(2GB in this case) and output the file sizes in MB/GB format. This command searches for files inside c:\mydata folder. You can run this against any folder.

Get-ChildItem -path c:\mydata -recurse | Where-Object  {
    ($_.Length /1GB) -gt 2 
} | ForEach-Object {
    ($_.length/1GB).Tostring("0.00")
}

Today, I will take you through some of the PowerShell one-liners which will help you in querying patches installed in your machine.
 List All installed patches:

 
 PS C:>gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering | select Description, Hotfixid

 List all patches that are installed in last 30 days:

 PS C:> gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering | ? {$_.InstalledOn} | where { (Get-date($_.Installedon)) -gt (get-date).adddays(-30) }

 List all patches installed on specific date:

 PS C:> gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering | ? {$_.InstalledOn} | where { (Get-date($_.Installedon)) -gt (get-date 10/31/2009) }

Query for a specific hotfix by providing hotfix ID(KB12345 format):

PS C:> gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering | ? {$_.HotfixID -match ” KB975025″ }

List all hotfixes installed by administrator account:

PS C:> gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering | ? {$_.InstalledBy -match “administrator” }

You can adopt the above queries and run against remote machine by passing the computer name shown like below.
 PS C:> gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering -Computer remotecomp | ? {$_.InstalledOn} | where { (Get-date($_.Installedon)) -gt (get-date).adddays(-30) }

Happy Learning,
Sitaram Pamarthi

• Windows 7
• Windows Vista

“MMC cannot open the file . This may be because the file does not exist, is not an MMC console, or was created by a later version of MMC. This may also be because you don’t have sufficient access rights to the file“

Many people aren’t aware of this beautiful feature introduced with Windows 2000 and continuing in it’s successors. To get a better sense of what it is, lets a take a example. Your CPU is spiking to 100% at mid nights and you got the task of identifying the root cause. The spike is very  sporadic in nature and lasts for very short time. How will you deal with this situation to see which process is taking high CPU?. Here comes the benefit of WMI event notifications. You can trigger a monitoring in your system using WMI event notifications to monitor the CPU utilization and do a process dump when it touches the monitored value. Task is done and you don’t need to spend time in monitoring manually. This is just a example only and you can adopt this to get alerted when a process starts or ends.

I may not be good at explaining the real use of WMI event notifications but I have found beautiful blog entry which explained this in detailed. Read it to become smart administrator.

Trevor Sullivan’s Tech Room

You can also refer to Microsoft Technet Site Article

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

This small piece of code helps you to know when a active directory user has changed his password last time. Use your own inventions to make the output appear the way you want.

$user = “user1”
$searcher=New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher
$searcher.Filter=”(&(samaccountname=$user))”
$results=$searcher.findone()
$changedtime  = [datetime]::fromfiletime($results.properties.pwdlastset[0])
write-host -b blue -f red The user, $user has changed password last time at $changedtime

It will be more easy if you have Quest PowerShell Cmdlets for active roles installed in your PC. Download it from Quest site and install on your machine and execute the below oneliner in Quest powershell window.

Get-QADUser user1 | ft displayname, PasswordLastSet

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi