Working with multiple computers in Powershell is absurdly easy using the Get-Content cmdlet to read computer names from a text file. It’s as easy as this… ?View Code POWERSHELL$a = Get-Content "C:\Scripts\Test.txt"   foreach ($i in $a) {$i + "`n" + "=========================="; Get-WMIObject Win32_BIOS -computername $i} As I’m doing more and more bash scripting I thought [...]

Here’s a quick Powershell one-liner to list all the Organizational Units, or OUs, in your Active Directory domain. Firstly you’ll probably need to load the ActiveDirectory module. This can be done at the Powershell prompt with the below command; ?View Code POWERSHELLImport-Module ActiveDirectory; Then we can use the Get-ADOrganizationalUnit cmdlet to retrieve a list of [...]

Many of us tend to jump quickly, into a new programming or scripting language, applying knowledge we’ve learned elsewhere to the current task at hand. Broadly speaking this works well but these always a little gotcha to trip you up! A good example is the Powershell -contains operator. It’s not like .Net String.Contains method as [...]

We don’t use SSRS much at my workplace but its usage is slowly creeping up. I realised that none of us are keeping an eye on the few subscriptions we have set-up. So I decided to do something about that. Here’s a bit of Powershell code that uses the SSRS Web Service to pull out [...]

Here’s a little snippet of Powershell code I used recently to test some TSQL that runs according to a two week schedule. This code will increment the date by one day, up to the maximum specified in $days, sleeping in between for a short while. The date is set back correctly at the end. Far [...]

I needed to generate a range of data about dates for a lookup table. There’s an elegant solution using a recursive cte that does the job; ?View Code TSQLWITH daysCte ( d ) AS ( SELECT CONVERT(DATETIME, ’1 January 2011′) AS d — starting date UNION ALL SELECT DATEADD(D, 1, d) FROM daysCte WHERE DATEPART(yyyy, d) [...]

Here’s a stored procedure I use to perform some simple benchmarking of inserts for MySQL. It takes three parameters; p_table_type which should be set to the storage engine you wish to benchmark i.e. ‘MyISAM’, ‘InnoDB’, p_inserts; set this to the number of inserts to perform. p_autocommit; set the autocommit variable (relevant to InnoDB only) to [...]

Just a quick Powershell snippet that I’m going to use to run validation tests on one of my staging Failover Clusters during OOH. The script below will take some services offline, run the validation tests, before bringing the appropriate cluster groups back online. The report will be saved using the date as the name. To [...]

I needed to figure out a method for producing alerts when a domain account is approaching the password reset date. Here it is in a few lines of Powershell… ?View Code POWERSHELL# Set name here $name = "Rhys Campbell"; $user = Get-ADUser -LDAPFilter "(Name=$name)" -Properties PasswordLastSet; $days = $(Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy).MaxPasswordAge; $expires = $user.PasswordLastSet + $days; $days_left [...]

A few days ago a developer came to me with a query that was executing slowly on a staging server. On this server it took 16 long seconds to execute while on other servers it took about 1 second. I did a quick schema compare and found them to be identical. So I ran the [...]