Tag Archives: PowerShell

Active Directory provisioning script

When writing PowerShell scripts for use in our Active Directory environment, I noticed that I use the same variables and information in every script. That’s all fine, but when something changes I had to update each and every script seperately. And you always forget to update 1 or 2 scripts which is annoying.
At one of my previous employers, they developed something they refered to as a provisioning script. This script not only contained these variables and information, but also a lot of commonly used functions. Among others, this script contained functions to create new user accounts and service accounts. Other scripts, outside of the provisioning script, could then ‘import’ the provisioning script using a technique called dot sourcing and be able to use the variables declared in the provisioning script as well as the functions from the provisioning script.
So when information changes, I only have to update 1 location.

Continue reading Active Directory provisioning script

Monitor AD group changes

Ever wanted to monitor group changes in AD? This is a script I came up with to do just that. It will collect the security log events from the last hour on all your domain controllers.

In order to use this script, just create a new scheduled task on a machine with the Active Directory module for Windows PowerShell installed and run this script every hour (or whatever you changed $time to). !! Note that the scheduled task needs to be run with an account which has domain admin privileges to be able to read from the security logs of all your domain controllers !!>

Continue reading Monitor AD group changes

Fix Windows Update error code 0x80244022, 0x8024401C and 0x80072EE2

WSUS is a great product from Microsoft to keep your servers up to date. In the past years, I have often used it at the companies I worked for. But it has it downsides as well. Sometimes the Windows Update client just won’t work. You’ll get errors like 0x80244022, 0x8024401C and 0x80072EE2 and just haven’t got a clue what is going on.

I have collected a number of solutions to fix these errors and put them in a PowerShell script. This script contains all the tricks I had to pull to get the Windows Update client running again.
Continue reading Fix Windows Update error code 0x80244022, 0x8024401C and 0x80072EE2