Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Use PowerShell to Get Local Group Members from a Remote Computer

I had a friend ask me recently how to get a list of administrators from a server.

"That's easy" I thought. "You just have to... um... actually..."

It turns out that this can be frustratingly difficult in PowerShell, so I wrote this module to make it easier when I'll need to do this in the future. It's comprised of three functions:
  • Add-NoteProperty: About 90% of the time when I want to create a custom PSObject and add some properties, they're all NoteProperties. This function makes adding a property easy, like so: Add-NoteProperty $my_object 'PropertyName' $property
  • Get-COMProperty: This is a kludgy hack to get around the fact that members of groups gotten through ADSI get returned as __ComObject objects, and you have to call the InvokeMember() static method of the class in order to get at their properties. Now I can just do this: Get-COMProperty $com_object 'PropertyName'
  • Get-LocalGroups: This is the function that we needed. It returns a list of custom PSObjects representing the local groups on a server, and each one has a property called Members that is a list of custom PSObjects for each member, including the Name, Domain, and ADSPath. From there, you can use whatever method you want to the object you want, whether it's using Get-QADUser for domain users, or whatever, for example: Get-LocalGroups computername.
If you're using Powershell v2 CTP3 or higher, you can use help on each of the functions to see examples if you forget. You can download the module from Poshcode.org here.



1 comment:

Al Howarth said...
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