[MSFT-BE] Arlindo's Blog - IT Pro Evangelist

We introduced something called “Fix My Settings” in IE7+ on Windows Vista. This is something useful because we warn the users upfront that the changes they they try / have made are not secure.

Let me explain it with an an example:

You change the protected mode security setting for the Internet Zone, IE will immediately warn you that this is not secure. See the screenshot below.

The Security center will pop-up telling you that there is an issue with the “Internet Security settings”, you can even restore the settings from there.

Now whenever you start your IE the first thing you will notice is that IE warns you about the fact that your pc could be at risk. You have then two options one is to go on to the site you wanted to visit the other one is to restore your settings.

So far so good. Now I’ve got a question from someone who is asking when you click on fix your settings which setting will be reset. Is it something that has been defined by Microsoft or can you define your own default settings.

Let’s continue with powershell and the next thing I showed was how to create and test a script. The script we wanted to create was a move mailbox script. Not just a move mailbox but one where we searched for the top 3 biggest mailboxes.

First let me explain a little bit the mailboxstatistics command and how we can get the top 3 mailboxes in size.

You know now how to get stats, sort them and filter the top 3 out of it lets continue with the script we created.

The technetdemo.msh script:

Let me explain some of the new commands we used in this script.

The param command is used to pass parameters to the scripts, in this case we are asking for the target server.

The out-null command is obvious, do not write output.

The Write-host command will write the message to the host. This can be useful to have some information about the status of your script.

The “$mbxset=” command is to create a variable with in this example the get-mailboxstatistics command, this means that the mbxset will contain the legacydn name of the top 3 mailboxes.

We can now use the variable and pipe it to a move-mailbox command to move those mailboxes.

I recommend to use the what-if or –validate command to see what the result of the move mailbox will be.

You can now just run the script in the shell by referring to the file.

The biggest advantage of Powershell scripting is that you can test each line of your script before actually hitting the complete script. In VBscripting you had to run the complete script and wait and see or use a debugger to debug each line.

The last part of the Powershell scripting is reporting. I explained that there some command to do diagnostics and some commands to do reporting.

For the diagnostics part there are commands like :

For reporting there are commands like export-csv which lets you export the information to a csv file there are also some scripts that we have created like out-html and out-chart which outputs information to a html file or to a chart. (See screenshots for an example)

The following example will get the mailbox stats, sort them by itemcount and output certain information to a html file:

So far for the Powershell scripting.

The next item on this post was some Q & A we got after the session:

Q: Can you schedule a Powershell script like the charting script?

Answer: We did not disclosed any licensing on Exchange 2007 yet.

Q: Will there only be support of 64 bit?

Answer: There will only be 64bit support, no support for Itanium only x64 based systems.

Q: Unified Messaging Video?

Answer: I told you I would look after the UM video and unfortunately there is not yet a public version of the video available however here is a link to another video which is a cool demo on the LCR and CCR technology. http://msexchangeteam.com/videos/9/drandha/entry427787.aspx

If you have other questions please mail (Arlindo.alves@microsoft.com) me and I will try to answer them.

On Wednesday June 7th I give Technet Evening about Exchange 2007, during this 2 hour session I give a Technical overview of Exchange 2007. I will not post a wrap-up of the session because Ilse Van Criekinge already did on her Pro-Exchange user group site. Ilse created a great article which is a good summary of my session.

What I will do here is post all scripts and commands I used to demo the Exchange Shell based on Monad Technology.

Remember the first demo’s I showed with the Exchange Management console.

• Change the phone number of a user.
• Create a new storagegroup with a new database. Mount the database and move the user(s) mailbox that start with a B.

I aimed to do the same within the Monad Shell, here are the cmdlets I used to perform the actions as described above:

Change the phone number of user Bob Kelly:

I used three commands to get the results I wanted however it was perfectly possible to have it done in two commands

This is just the beginning and imagine that you want to change the department of all users that are reporting to the HR Manager. Lets assume that you now who the HR manager is, in this case it is Kim Akers.

Change the department of Kim Akers direct reports:

Creation of a new storagegroup, mailboxdatabase and move mailbox:

If you don’t know the exact cmdlets to create a storage group there is always the help command:

Get-Command *storage*

Just saw two interesting Vista Webcasts given by two of our top Security Experts:

TechNet Webcast: Windows Vista Security Tidbits (Level 300)

Thursday, June 15, 2006 - 6:45 AM - 8:00 AM Pacific Time

Jesper Johansson, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Have you played with Windows Vista yet? Do you have that sinking feeling of "Oh man, another new operating system to learn. This is daunting. I don't want this." Yeah right! You're chomping at the bit to get started, aren't you? This is why we're propeller heads in the first place—to play with the cool new technologies first. Windows Vista introduces many large changes to security, such as User Account Protection and process isolation. Windows Vista also brings many smaller, subtle, but significant changes to the system. Join this webcast for a guided tour that highlights some of these changes. They include new or changed default security settings, new access control lists (ACLs), new groups and accounts, and a number of other minor changes that could be very important as you evaluate deploying Windows Vista.

TechNet Webcast: Windows Vista: Networking, Firewall, and IPsec Improvements (Level 300)

Thursday, June 15, 2006 - 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM Pacific Time

Steve Riley, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Bored with Windows networking? Just wait until you see the new networking components that Windows Vista packs. This webcast introduces the new TCP/IP stack that has been rebuilt for performance and security. Learn about support in Windows Vista for the strong end-system model and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). There is also a completely redesigned filtering engine, improved automatic performance tuning, and increased resiliency against TCP/IP-based denial of service (DoS) attacks. We cover enhancements to the firewall, including bidirectional policy control, enforcement of service hardening communications, and more. We also discuss improvements to Internet Protocol security (IPsec) such as simplified policies to speed up connection times, a new UI that is integrated with the firewall, user and application-based policies, more troubleshooting and diagnostic tools, and support for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The Pro-Exchange UG focuses mainly on Exchange and can be reached at http://www.pro-exchange.be. They are having their first UG meeting on June 20th.During this session they will have a presentation about how the new Sharepoint can help you as an Exchange Administrator.

If you want to attend this UG meeting you should register yourself on the Pro-Exchange site.

The SQLUG focuses mainly on SQL server and not only for an IT Pro but also for development onto the SQL server products and can be reached at http://www.sqlug.be . They are also having the first UG meeting on June 22th.

The content of their session is not decided yet and they let you choose between different topics:

UG Meeting Agenda

With Vista it is now possible to extend a volume online, it is only a basic version of the well known disk manager tools.

The next screenshots shows how it’s possible to extend the c:\ volume online.

The key features of SCVMM are:

Integration with Operations Manager and Reporting: Operations Manager will be used to identify what we call the consolidation candidates. The performance data stored in Operations Manager is used to create a consolidation candidates report that takes all of these issues under consideration.

Operations Manager is the management solution for both physical and virtual machines infrastructure.

Centralized view of all VMs in the environment and their status, Host/VM groupings scalable to thousands of VMs. Reports on consolidation candidates, utilization trending, optimization opportunities

Virtual Machine Creation: Wizard-based, Rapid creation of VMs using physical to Virtual or pre-defined templates.

Virtual Machine placement and Deployment: Recommendation based on host capacity and utilization, manual admin override possible. Movement of VM’s over SAN.

Self Service Provisioning User Interface: User interface allowing end users to request and place VMs, Admin configures rules and boundaries for provisioning

Automation: The VMM is completely scriptable.

This list is a summary of what SCVMM will be capable of.

What I really like is the self-service provisioning tool, where you will be able to select a machine based on pre-defined templates, you will receive an e-mail with the ready to use Terminal Services connection into it.

I am busy preparing the Belgian Technet Evening where I will give an overview of Exchange 2007. There will be an overview of the new ESM, the new features in Outlook Web Access and last but not least I will demo the power of “PowerShell” within Exchange 2007.

So after downloading my Exchange 2007 vpc, I started with the “PowerShell” scripting because, for me it is the coolest item in Exchange 2007 not.

How the heck do you start with this new scripting language? It’s quite simple we have 350 commands, called commandlets for Exchange 2007. This scripting language has been made very simple.

Let’s get started:

First I wanted to know which cmdlets there where available for Exchange 2007

• Get-excommand

The output is a list with all cmdlets available for Exchange 2007.

As you can see the command are based on verb-noun principle.

As an Exchange administrator you want to know which mailboxes there are on my Exchange 2007 environment. If you want to do that with VBscripting, you will have to write quite some lines to get this information.

In PowerShell it is only one command: get-mailbox

This command returns us the list of mailboxes available on your exchange servers.

Let’s take a look at only one user Terry Adams for example: get-mailbox terrya

As you can see it is the same table but only for Terry Adams, now every object have different properties. If you want to see which properties the get-mailbox command has you can run the same command and pipe the results to a format-list which will return all the properties of the get-mailbox object.

An example: get-mailbox terrya | format-list

This screenshot gives only a few of the properties of the get-mailbox object.

Let’s try something more complex to do, for instance let’s change the quota for all users starting with the letter “t” and give them a mailbox limit to 100MB.

Now you need to know which command will help us achieving our goal.

Get-mailbox terrya | fl “*quota*” this command will get all Quota properties for Terry Adams. Yes you can use wildcards so I could also use “*qu*”.

This is done deal now lets return all the users that start with a “t”:

Now the final command and set the quota for the users:

The screenshot shows you that we changed the storagequota of all users starting with “t” from unlimited to 100mb with only one command line.

I will end this “PowerShell scripting” blogpost here. I showed only some of the basics of “PowerShell”.

by aralves | 1 Comments
Filed Under: Technet, Office 2007, Scripting