The blog of Darren Mar-Elia — the GPOGUY and founder of SDM Software
The folks at NetWrix have just announced their newest product–Group Policy Change Reporter. The product comes in both a freeware and commercial version and can provide detailed change reporting on who made changes to GPOs, what settings were changed and when. It comes with a number of out-of-the-box reports as well.
Check it out!
Hey Folks. The Group Policy Team at Microsoft is looking for feedback on managing Windows Servers. They’ve put a survey up online. If you want to get your feedback and experiences heard, and incorporated into future products, this is an ideal opportunity to do it! The survey is up until July 15th so get in there!
Well, in keeping with our current tradition of delivering PowerShell-based solutions for Group Policy Management, SDM Software has released its latest product–the Group Policy Health Cmdlet. This cmdlet basically lets you get quick and detailed Group Policy processing status across one or more machines within your enterprise. Its pretty cool in that you can feed it either a machine name, an OU name or a domain name and it will resolve all computer objects in those containers, and query each one, returning results either as an object (shown in the screenshot below) or as an XML document that you can save or manipulate using PowerShell’s built-in XML capabilities. You can take a video tour of the product here, which shows off some of its features.
And while the product is not free, you can download a trial copy and use it for up to 10 queries. After that, to buy a copy is, well, cheap if you ask me 
. Anyway, check it out and let us know what you think!
Tags:
Group Policy, PowerShell, SDM Software, Group Policy Health
I noticed that Jeff Hicks called me out on his blog for the Scripting/SysAdmin Meme, so I figured I would follow through with the chain and answer the questions here:
How old were you when you started using computers?
I was about 15.
What was your first machine?
The first computer that I used was probably a Cromemco multi-user system in High School or the original Apple computer. The first computer I owned was an Atari 800 that I got for Christmas in 1978 .
What was the first real script you wrote?
Hmm. Well, my first language was BASIC–not sure that is really a scripting language but it approximated that on the Atari. But in terms of real scripting languages it was probably DOS batch.
What scripting languages have you used?
DOS batch, Fastlane FINAL, Perl, VBScript, JScript, PowerShell. Probably missing a couple in there.
What was your first professional sysadmin gig?
My first job out of college, as I struggled to be a bike racer, was part-time warehouse guy and part-time computer guy for a small computer leasing company. I did some basic maintenance and Paradox development. My first real sys admin. job was for an environmental consulting company. When I started, they had a Sun TOPS network based on Appletalk!!
If you knew then what you know now, would have started in IT?
Excellent question. Not sure. IT has changed a lot, there is a lot of things I don’t like about it. I think I might have spent more time in dev. if I knew then what I know now.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new sysadmins, what would it be?
What worked for me may not work for others, but I made a conscious decision to reach out and help people. This started with the early winnt-bhs mailing list on Compuserve in the mid-90s and continues today. I think this business is all about spreading the knowledge, because there is so much to learn. So, if you want to advance your own career, help others as you learn. It brings many side benefits, including gaining a reputation that might lead to more interesting things than just fixing broken printers .
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had scripting?
Scripting is one of those things that I did out of necessity, but I can remember a perl script that I had to write to change thousands of machines from static IP to dynamic. I was particularly proud of that at the time. I think now I get the most kick out of developing PowerShell cmdlets. Fun stuff.
Who am I calling out?
I created a whitepaper a while back that describes how you can use SDM Software’s free GPMC cmdlets along with our commercial GPExpert(tm) Scripting Toolkit product to automate Group Policy management using PowerShell. That whitepaper, entitled "Automating Group Policy Management" is now up on our website for download. You do have to register for it but it goes through a bunch of different scenarios, including performing basic GPO management tasks as well as using the Toolkit to audit or modify Group Policy settings across a group of GPOs.
Tags
Well, Active Directory MVP and well-known speaker Guido Grillenmeier from HP has taken my AD tombstone reanimation cmdlets and fashioned a very cool PowerShell script that uses the cmdlets and the new AD snapshot mounting feature in Server 2008 to not only restore deleted objects but also restore their attributes that are lost when the object is deleted. Guido is presenting an AD recovery talk at TechEd in Orlando tomorrow and the script will be featured in that talk. If you are at TechEd, I highly recommend you check out his talk.
Guido has also provided some great feedback on my tombstone reanimation cmdlets so look for a 1.1 version of them very soon!
You can download Guido’s PowerShell script here !
Thanks Guido!
Tags
Active Directory, tombstone reanimation, PowerShell, SDM Software
I’ve heard this question often enough since the Remote Server Administration Tools shipped that I thought it was worth blogging about it. After you install RSAT on your Vista, SP1 machine, you won’t find GPMC installed right away. You’ll need to go into the Control Panel, Programs and Features applet to enable it. Once in Programs and Features, select the link on the left that says Turn Windows Features on and off. Whent the list of features comes up, navigate to Remote Server Administration Tools, Feature Administration Tools, Group Policy Management Tools and check that box to select the GPMC, as shown below
Then click OK and once the install completes, you will have GPMC!
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Well, despite the morbid title, this is not about dead things. Well, not quite. And amazingly its not about Group Policy either.
In my ever increasing thirst for PowerShell knowledge, I thought I would experiment a bit with some Active Directory-based cmdlets this time. The result is two free PowerShell Cmdlets that retrieve and reanimate AD Tombstones (for an excellent backgrounder article on Tombstone Reanimation, check out Gil Kirkpatrick’s piece in TechNet Magazine from last September).
You can optionally register for and download these new AD tombstone cmdlets at www.sdmsoftware.com/freeware. Once you download and install the setup, and launch the console file that comes with it, you’ll have two new cmdlets at your disposal*:
get-SDMADTombstone
restore-SDMADTombstone
The first cmdlet, most obviously retrieves a listing of all deleted objects in a given domain. You can filter the results using the -Filter parameter to search for a given text string within the DN of the deleted object. The 2nd cmdlet, which does the actual restoral work, is meant to be used with the first one. So, for example, if I have a user "Dick Evans" who was deleted, and I want to restore him, I can issue the following command:
get-SDMADTombstone -Filter Evans | restore-SDMADTombstone
The restore- cmdlet also implements the -whatif parameter, so that you can see what objects will be restored prior to pulling the trigger.
So, I encourage everyone to download and check it out and provide feedback. I look forward to hearing your input.
Have fun!
Tags:
Active Directory, PowerShell, Tombstone Reanimation
* Note: This blog post was edited after the initial posting. Thanks to feedback from Dmitry, I renamed the cmdlets to be singular, in keeping with PowerShell convention, and also changed the output format of the date fields. Otherwise, everything is the same!
