Monthly Archives: May 2015

WindowsServer

Powershell – Add local Administrator

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If you want to add Active Directory user or group to the local administrator group on a computer, you can use Powershell.

User and Group

To add user or group, we can use the cmdlet Invoke-Command associated with net localgroup.

Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {net Localgroup administrators /add $args[0] } -ArgumentList("LAB\alexandre")

Computer

It is also possible to add a computer account into local Administrator group, you can use the command above but don’t forget to add the $ at the end of computer name.

Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {net Localgroup administrators /add $args[0] } -ArgumentList("LAB\SRVSCCM$")

More

You can get more informations about net localgroup here.

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WindowsServer

Powershell – Change computer description

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To continue in Powershell posts, we will see how to change the local description of the server. Not in Active Directory attribute but on the computer itself.

System Description

The local description is set is the WMI of the server. In the class Win32_OperatingSystem. To change it, we need to get the objects, set the new content and save the modification.

$OSWMI=Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem
$OSWMI.Description="My Server"
$OSWMI.put()

Remote

It is possible to modify the description on a remote computer, however, we need to adapt the script if the string is store in a variable.

With the Invoke-Command we add the parameter –ArgumentList, so that our variable content will be available on the execution on the remote host.

$myDescription="My Server"
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $lServerName -ScriptBlock {$OSWMI=Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem;$OSWMI.Description=$args[0];$OSWMI.put() } -ArgumentList($myDescription)

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You can get more information about Win32_OperatingSystem class here

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WindowsServer

Powershell – How to format all disks

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Did you know that you can manage disks, partitions and volumes using Powershell? Microsoft released a lot of cmdlet in order to facilitate handling of disks.

With virtualization, you can easily add disk to your server, but you have to create the volume yourself. I wrote a script that you can integrate in your process, runbooks or others.

Disks initialization

First thing to do, is to prepare disks to host volume. We need to set disks online and to disable Read only.

try {
#Set all disks, except the first disk, to online and writable
Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Set-Disk -IsOffline $False
Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Set-Disk -isReadOnly $False
 
#Initialize all disks
Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT
}catch{
Write-Host $_.Exception.Message
}

Volume

Once disks are ready, we need to create, and format volume.

try {
#Create Partition on all disk, auto assign letter and use maximum size
Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| New-Partition -AssignDriveLetter -UseMaximumSize
#Get all partitions and format them
Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Get-Partition |?{$_.type -like "Basic"}| Format-Volume -Confirm:$false
}catch{
Write-Host $_.Exception.Message
}

Remote

If you want to execute these command on a remote host, it is possible. We will use the cmdlet Invoke-Command

try {
#Set all disks, except the first disk, to online and writable
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $lServerName -ScriptBlock {Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Set-Disk -IsOffline $False}
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $lServerName -ScriptBlock {Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Set-Disk -isReadOnly $False}
#Initialize all disks
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $lServerName -ScriptBlock {Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT}
#Create Partition on all disk, auto assign letter and use maximum size
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $lServerName -ScriptBlock {Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| New-Partition -AssignDriveLetter -UseMaximumSize}
#Get all partitions and format them
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $lServerName -ScriptBlock {Get-Disk | ?{$_.number -ne 0}| Get-Partition |?{$_.type -like "Basic"}| Format-Volume -Confirm:$false }			
}catch{
Write-Host  $_.Exception.Message
}

More

You can get more information about Disk Management cmdlet here.

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