Get-Scripting Podcast Pilot Episode

Welcome to the pilot episode of the Get-Scripting podcast! Tune in to listen to us talk and interview people about Powershell.

Download it here , subscribe in iTunes or via a different feed reader.

In the first epsiode we have part 1 of an interview with James O'Neill from Microsoft - we talk about Powershell, and in particular the work he has done with Hyper-V.

(It's a pilot OK, so bear with us as we get to grips with things like editing and publishing podcasts :-) )

Blog note links:

Ways to learn Powershell:

Download Powershell

Powershell Getting Started Guide

Interview

James O'Neill's blog

Hyper-V functions on Codeplex

Send us feedback at

get [dash] scripting [at] hotmail [dot] co [dot] uk

or leave a comment here on the blog

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 3 (Mailboxes Over 2GB)

In parts 1 and 2 we looked at retrieving mailbox information from Exchange 2003 using WMI and Powershell.

In part 3 we're going to take another look at this topic area for another potential common request along the lines of 'can you give me a list of all mailboxes over 2GB?'

Again we use the MicrosoftExchangeV2 WMI namespace and the Exchange_Mailbox class and this time use the where-object cmdlet to only return results where the size of the mailbox is greater than 2GB - obviously you can change this value to your own needs. (Note: the value is specified in KB)

Once again very simple to achieve a really effective result.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | where-object { $_.Size -gt 2097152 } | sort-object MailboxDisplayName}

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 2 (Top 10 Largest Mailboxes Per Server)

In part 1 I looked at how to retrieve mailbox information from Exchange 2003 using WMI and Powershell.

Taking this on one step further along the lines of your manager asks for a list of the biggest Exchange mailboxes, we can use a similar command to get the mailbox info, sort the list by size and then use the -First parameter of the Select-Object cmdlet to bring back only the top 10 say.

Its as easy as that. Of course you could then output the data to a csv file using an additional pipeline so that the info is easy to forward on.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | sort-object Size -Descending | select-object -First 10 MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size | export-csv c:\scripts\top10.csv

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 1 (Get Mailbox Info)

OK, so I had some fun making a Powergui Powerpack for Exchange 2003, but its probably about time I wrote about how to do this natively in Powershell.

There is a lot of information you can get out of Exchange 2003 using WMI. Yikes, you might say if you previously thought about doing that with VBScript; however, with Powershell its easy!

We simply use the Get-WMIObject cmdlet, use the ExchangeV2 namespace and Exchange_Mailbox class and connect to the Exchange Server in question.

(You can find all about the Exchange_Mailbox class over on MSDN. Sysadmins amongst you might think MSDN is only for developers, but the Exchange WMI pages are pretty straightforward and all contain a very nice example in VBScript where you can figure most stuff out which is available to you.)

This will return you all the mailbox objects on that server. We then use some basic sorting and selecting to present the info nicely.


Get-WMIObject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | format-table MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size

Checking AD replication latency with Powershell

Having suffered from some AD replication issues in the past (the dreaded lingering objects), its been at the back of my mind on how to keep an eye on replication between all the DC's.

Also a frequent question from the helpdesk goes along the lines of they've made a change to somebody's AD account and how long is it going to be before that change will make it around to all of the DC's? In the past I've kind of stuck my finger in the air and given an approximate time based on replication intervals in the site links.

So how about some Powershell which checks AD replication latency for you (and at the same time confirms all DC's are replicating) so you can give a more precise figure on how long it takes for a change to replicate the whole way around?

Brandon at the BSonPosh blog has a frankly brilliant post with a script you can run which creates a temporary contact in AD, then polls each DC until it appears, records the time taken and finally removes the test contact.

For me this was a Snover moment (i.e. the top of my head exploded!), this is so useful for me its unreal, and possibly the best bit: my finger in the air estimate was pretty darn close. :-)