PowerShell | Title (Required)

Remote Command Line–GFI MAX

June 16, 2015 by Robert Pearman 1 Comment

I did something stupid. When i say ‘something’ i mean, something additional to the other stupid things i usually do in the course of the day.

We had a new PC in for setup, usually this is the work of my proles Co Workers, but as i was the only one in the office that day i knuckled down and bloody well did it myself. The first task we usually undertake is to remove all of the preinstalled additional programs vendors like to ship with their PCs. If you missed the recent Lenovo incident, that is a great example of why you might want to do this. Read more of this post

Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with GFI, Remote Acces. CMD

Populating Active Directory with Computer Information

June 4, 2015 by Robert Pearman Leave a comment

Here is a very quick tip i have employed to good effect at client sites.

It goes back to this very cool command i shared a few years ago now, here. Read more of this post

Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with Audit, Computers, PowerShell, Serial Number, WMI

Hide Users from Essentials Dashboard 2011 & 2012

March 3, 2015 by Robert Pearman 1 Comment

I wrote a blog post a few months back about how to use WSS PowerShell to hide Users from the Essentials 2012 R2 Dashboard. A commenter on that post asked whether or not we could do the same for 2012 R1. I know the PowerShell Support for R1 is not as rich as it is in R2, and sure enough i could not see a way to do it directly. But that just makes it more fun!

Office 365 Email Password Reminder

January 23, 2015 by Robert Pearman 62 Comments

Regular readers will no doubt be aware of the script i wrote about two years ago to alert a user their password was about to expire. If not, just what exactly have you been doing with your time?

In any case, several people have asked me if it can be made to work with Office 365. Using 365 as the email relay to send the messages, was one thing, querying 365 for a users password expiry, was something else. Something which at the time i believe could not be done.

Given they constantly release new features and tweaks, i revisited it this week and found that actually it can now be done, with a few tweaks to the original script.

Quick Fix: Uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection Remotely

January 22, 2015 by Robert Pearman 2 Comments

Finally moving my last client from Symantec SEPM to Trend Micros WFBS Hosted platform. It was a small SEPM deployment, only 7 clients and a server but i was surprised to be reminded that SEPM has no ‘uninstall’ tool from their console. So much for centralised management.

I did a lot of searching around for a reliable solution, most of which came back to using MSIEXEC from a command line.

There are various ways of course to execute a command on a remote machine, you can use PSTools’, PSExec for example, but i prefer to use PowerShell where i can. Read more of this post

Filed under General, PowerShell, Quick Fix, Tips & Tricks Tagged with End Point Protection, PowerShell, Symantec, Version 12

Windows Server Essentials–Client Backup Monitoring

September 18, 2014 by Robert Pearman 4 Comments

Just a quick post to say i have posted a script that works with GFIs RMM platform to monitor Client Backups for Windows Server Essentials.

Password Change Reminder PowerShell Script Updated!

September 18, 2014 by Robert Pearman 10 Comments

Back in 2012 i wrote a script to help me remind users about their password expiry, to reduce the number of calls i got on the helpdesk. I decided to share it and published it on the TechNet Gallery,