Exchange 2003, WMI, AD and Powershell - Part 5 (Querying AD for Exchange 2003 Information)

In previous posts in this series we have looked in particular at some of the Exchange 2003 WMI classes. So far this has required manual specification of which Exchange server you want to retrieve info from; wouldn't it be nice if you could use Powershell to find all the Exchange 2003 servers in your environment then run the WMI query against the results? Fortunately for us Exchange 2003 stores a lot of configuration information in Active Directory so we can query AD to retrieve what we need. There is a great article here which details how you can do this. We do the following:

Create a new directory object using .Net for the current AD domain.

$root= New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE")

Use ADSI to get the configuration partition of AD.

$cfgNC = [adsi]("LDAP://" + $root.Get("configurationNamingContext"))

Create a directory search object

$search = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($cfgNC)

Filter on the Exchange Server object class - the below image should help illustrate what we are doing here. (other classes you can search on can be found here)

$search.filter = '(objectclass=msExchExchangeServer)'






Use the FindAll method to execute the search.

$ExchServer = $search.FindAll()

Finally, return the names of all the results.

$ExchServer | foreach {$_.properties.name}

Which in the example from the screenshot would produce a result:

EXCH

You can now combine this with any of the previous WMI scripts to run them against all the Exchange servers in your environment, e.g. for Top 10 largest mailboxes on each server:

$root= New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE")
$cfgNC = [adsi]("LDAP://" + $root.Get("configurationNamingContext"))
$search = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($cfgNC)
$search.filter = '(objectclass=msExchExchangeServer)'
$ExchServer = $search.FindAll()

foreach ($server in $ExchServer)
{
$ExchangeServers = $ExchangeServers + $ExchServer | foreach {$_.properties.name}
}
foreach ($computer in $ExchangeServers) {
Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer $computer | sort-object Size -Descending | select-object -First 10 MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size}

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 4.5 (Counting Users in Storage Groups and Mailbox Stores)

OK, so this wasn't going to be in the original series I was writing, but an issue came up at work where I needed to quickly find the total number of users in each Storage Group.

Naturally I turned to Powershell for the solution.

Just supply the names of the Storage Groups in a text file, use Powershell to open the text file and for each of the Storage Groups use the Exchange_Mailbox class and filter on the Storage Group name. Use the feature .count to just return the number of users rather than any properties and write to the screen the result.

$StorageGroups = Get-Content c:\Scripts\StorageGroups.txt
foreach ($SG in $StorageGroups){
$Total = (Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName -filter "StorageGroupName = '$SG'").count
Write-Host $SG ":" $Total "users"
}


Which produces something along the lines of:

Storage Group 01 : 152 users
Storage Group 02 : 373 users
Storage Group 03 : 259 users
Storage Group 04 : 220 users


Taking this one step futher you can drill down into the Mailbox Stores with similar code (this time with the names of the Mailbox Stores in a text file) and find how many users on each store:

$MailboxStores = Get-Content c:\Scripts\MailboxStores.txt
foreach ($Store in $MailboxStores){
$Total = (Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName -filter "Storename = '$Store'").count
Write-Host $Store ":" $Total "users"
}

Which gives you the result:

Mailbox Store 01 : 23 users
Mailbox Store 02 : 32 users
Mailbox Store 03 : 41 users
Mailbox Store 04 : 30 users
Mailbox Store 05 : 26 users
Mailbox Store 06 : 39 users
etc.............

Exchange 2003, WMI and Powershell - Part 4 (Disconnected Mailboxes)

In parts 1 , 2 , 3 we looked at retrieving mailbox information from Exchange 2003 using WMI and Powershell.

In part 4 we're going to take another look at this topic area for something slightly more advanced - how to get a list of all mailboxes which have been deleted, but are still in the time frame for 'Keep Deleted Mailboxes for: x days'.

A typical scenario might be a mailbox has been deleted incorrectly and you need to re-connect it to an AD account; however, since the AD account has gone, how do you know which Mailbox Store was the home for the mailbox?

In the Exchange management GUI you would need to browse through each mailbox store looking for mailboxes marked with the red cross. Not too bad a job if you only have one mailbox store, but if that number is in the 10's of Mailbox Stores then its a pretty tedious task.

Step forward Powershell!

Again use the Exchange_Mailbox class and this time look for the DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS value. This value gets populated after the mailbox has been marked for deletion. We look for a value which begins with "2", i.e. the mailbox has been deleted sometime after the year 2000 (there may be a better way to do this), and return info about each mailbox in this state, including the Servername and Mailbox Store Name so that you can easily track the mailbox down.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName | where { $_.DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS -like '2*' } | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | ft MailboxDisplayName,ServerName,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size,DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS


Update 12/08/08:

Thanks to Shay Levy who has come back with a better way to do this!

"Using a -filter parameter which makes your query run on the server and return only the relevant mailbox objects". You should find that this significantly improves the speed of the query. Check the comments for this post for full details.

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer ExchangeServerName -filter "DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS is not null" | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | ft MailboxDisplayName,ServerName,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size

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

PowerGUI / Exchange 2003

I've used the PowerGUI script editor as my editor of choice ever since I started using Powershell, but I never really got the PowerGUI thing.

Recently at the UK Powershell User Group we had the brilliant opportunity to visit Quest in the UK and be presented to by Dmitry Sotnikov about PowerGUI and the AD cmdlets. Before going I figured I'd better get to grips with PowerGUI so spent some time watching the online tutorial videos and started playing around with it.

Doing this combined with what I picked up from the Quest visit it started to dawn on me how useful this could be. It had frustrated me for a while that although there is great support for Powershell in Exchange 2007 there wasn't anything native for Exchange 2003, which is what we use in our environment.; so I thought why not try and make a PowerGUI powerpack for it.

There's a fair bit on the web about using WMI to manage Exchange 2003, in particular a very helpful article from Dmitry.

So with a little bit of playing I have posted version 0.1 to the PowerGUI powerpack library. With a bit of work I think it could be improved a lot (I have no actions or links yet, just script nodes), but I'd be interested in any feedback so leave me a comment if you've used it. I know there's a lot of uptake with Exchange 2007 now, but I'm sure there's plenty of 2003 sites still out there.

Even while putting the powerpack together I discovered things I could manage with Powershell so easily which would be really tricky to do through the Exchange Management GUI - my favourite is Get-DisconnectedMailboxes.

Quite often I need to find mailboxes which have had the AD account deleted and are waiting to expire from Exchange - not easy to do when the AD record has gone so you don't know which database they were on (we have over Exchange 40 databases). With the below Powershell WMI script it is dead easy to get a list of all disconnected mailboxes and which database they are in by using the DataDiscoveredAbsentInDS property:

Get-Wmiobject -namespace root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 -class Exchange_Mailbox -computer $computer | where { $_.DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS -like '2*' } | sort-object MailboxDisplayName | select-object MailboxDisplayName,Servername,StorageGroupName,StoreName,Size,DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS}

PowerGUI then displays the results in a really nice view!

I think I'll be using PowerGUI a lot from now on...........

Do I need all the transaction log files Exchange creates? Part 2

Back in April I posted about what to do if the disk your Exchange transaction log files reside on runs out of space. This was all done through the eseutil utility.

If you are not comfortable with this tool or would simply prefer a GUI-based way to do it, its possible to acheive the same result through the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (2003 or 2007).

There is a great post here which documents how to do it.

Something tells me I may well need to use this again sometime in the future.......

Do I need all the transaction log files Exchange creates?

Excellent posting here about Exchange transaction log files, in particular what to do if your transaction logs disk fills up.

www.exchangerecovery.org

Kind of handy when you come back to work after a week and the log file disk is full. ;-)

The main point I got from it was the fact that you do not necessarily need all of the transaction logs for a storage group. So say if your disk has filled up with transaction logs you can run eseutil to find out which log files you actually need and move the rest to a temporary location. This should then buy you some time to run a backup to flush the rest out properly.

Disabling Outlook Web Access on AD accounts

A request came up asking, "If we need to could we disable Outlook Web Access for a particuar list of users?"

After some digging around and some great help from Shay Levy on the Powergui message board I was able to come up with the following:

Set-QADUser 'springfield\homer.simpson' -ObjectAttributes @{ProtocolSettings='HTTP§0§1§§§§§§'}

If you need to disable more than one of the options it would be

Set-QADUser 'springfield\homer.simpson' -ObjectAttributes @{ProtocolSettings='HTTP§0§1§§§§§§,IMAP40§1§§§§§'}

The options detailed on the 'Exchange Features' tab of an AD account are stored in the ProtocolSettings field. If you look at that field in Adsiedit, you will see which options have been disabled, if any. From there you can grab the HTTP,IMAP etc string that you need.

More info here:
Making bulk protocolSettings changes

Send Welcome Email

Wouldn't it be nice to send your new users an email welcoming them to the company and providing them with some info about how things work. Anyway, I had a request to do this and since I don't think you can do it natively within Exchange 2003 I turned straight away to Powershell.

So, all you need to do is run a daily sceduled task which calls the below Powershell script. It finds the current and next days's dates, searches AD for users created between those dates (i.e. on the current day) and sends an email to the users it finds with the relevant info attached.

(Note: You need the Quest AD cmdlets installed unless you want to use ADSI for the AD search part.)

Doing the search by specifiying the exact date didn't seem to work very successfully. Digging around the Internet revealed the correct format to get the dates into and also searching between the two adjacent dates.


#Find today's and tomorrow's dates and store them in the 'yyyyMMdd}000000.0Z' format
$dayStart = "{0:yyyyMMdd}000000.0Z" -f (Get-Date)
$dayEnd = "{0:yyyyMMdd}000000.0Z" -f ((Get-Date).AddDays(1))

#Find AD users created between the two dates
$newuser = Get-QADUser -searchroot 'springfield.local/userou' -LdapFilter "(&(whenCreated>=$dayStart)(whenCreated<=$dayEnd))" -size 0

#Find the email address for each of the users and send a mail to them with the WelcomeTo.doc attachment
foreach ($address in $newuser)
{
$recipient = $address.mail
$sender = "sender@domain.com"
$server = "smtpservername"
$file = "path to attachment"
$subject = "subject"
$body = "body text"
$msg = new-object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage $sender, $recipient, $subject, $body
$attachment = new-object System.Net.Mail.Attachment $file
$msg.Attachments.Add($attachment)
$client = new-object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient $server
$client.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials
$client.Send($msg)
}