Category: Network

Monitoring Changes to Active Directory Sites and Subnets with PowerShell

by Trevor Jones, posted in Active Directory, ConfigMgr, Network, Powershell, SCCM

If you work with SCCM and you use AD Forest Discovery to automatically create boundaries from AD Sites or Subnets, you know how important it is for AD to stay up to date with the current information. And when something is changed in Sites or Subnets, you need to be made aware of it so you can reflect the change in your SCCM boundaries and boundary groups. Unfortunately, communication between IT teams is not always what it should be, so I wrote this script to run as a scheduled task and keep an eye on any changes made in AD Sites and IP subnets.

The script works by retrieving the current site and subnet information and exporting it to cache files. The next time the script runs, it will compare the current information with the information in the cached files, and if anything has changed, a report will be sent by email detailing the changes.

It’s one way of ensuring you’re keeping SCCM in sync with your AD!

New Tool: Delivery Optimization Monitor

by Trevor Jones, posted in Network, Powershell, Reporting, Windows Troubleshooting, WPF

Delivery Optimization Monitor is a tool for viewing Delivery Optimization data on the local or a remote PC.

It is based on the built-in Delivery Optimization UI in Windows 10 but allows you to view data graphically from remote computers as well.

The tool uses the Delivery Optimization PowerShell cmdlets built in to Windows 10 to retrieve and display DO data, including stats and charts for the current month, performance snapshot data and data on any current DO jobs.

Requirements

  • A supported version of Windows 10 (1703 onward)
  • PowerShell 5 minimum
  • .Net Framework 4.6.2 minimum
  • PS Remoting enabled to view data from remote computers.

This WPF tool is coded in Xaml and PowerShell and uses the MahApps.Metro and LiveCharts open source libraries.

Download

Download the tool from the Technet Gallery.

Use

To use the tool, extract the ZIP file, right-click the Delivery Optimization Monitor.ps1 and run with PowerShell.

To run against the local machine, you must run the tool elevated. To do so, create a shortcut to the ps1 file. Edit the properties of the shortcut and change the target to read:

PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File “<pathtoPS1file>”

Right-click the shortcut and run as administrator, or edit the shortcut properties (under Advanced) to run as administrator.

For completeness, you can also change the icon of the shortcut to the icon file included in the bin directory.

Delivery Optimization Statistics

There are 3 tabs – the first displays DO data for the current month together with charts for download and upload statistics.

The second tab displays PerfSnap data and the third displays any current DO jobs.

Shout Out

Shout out to Kevin Rahetilahy over at dev4sys.com for blogging about LiveCharts in PowerShell.

Source Code

Source code can be found on GitHub.

Ping all the Computers in an AD OU

by Trevor Jones, posted in Active Directory, Network, Powershell

Here is a clean and simple PowerShell script to ping all the computer accounts in an Active Directory OU, and return the Name, IP Address and any errors into a csv file.

# Enter CSV file location
$csv = "C:\Script_Files\OUPing.csv"
# Add the target OU in the SearchBase parameter
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter * -SearchBase "OU=Servers,DC=mydomain,DC=com" | Select Name | Sort-Object Name
$Computers = $Computers.Name
$Headers = "ComputerName,IP Address"
$Headers | Out-File -FilePath $csv -Encoding UTF8
foreach ($computer in $Computers)
{
Write-host "Pinging $Computer"
$Test = Test-Connection -ComputerName $computer -Count 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorVariable Err
if ($test -ne $null)
{
    $IP = $Test.IPV4Address.IPAddressToString
    $Output = "$Computer,$IP"
    $Output | Out-File -FilePath $csv -Encoding UTF8 -Append
}
Else
{
    $Output = "$Computer,$Err"
    $output | Out-File -FilePath $csv -Encoding UTF8 -Append
}
cls
}