Script Center

Active Directory week continues with the famous situation wherein certain users can't seem to remember their passwords and get locked out in the process of typing nonsense. Here's how to find locked-out accounts. Special appearance by the scripting kitty!

"Hey, Scripting Guy!" articles this week (November 17–21) are all about Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). So we're highlighting the AD DS scripting hub this week. Ah, sweet scripting symbiosis.

We have a forum! Post questions. Answer questions. Help each other out. The Scripting Guys can't possibly answer every e-mail message and forum post, so we deputize you as Junior Scripting Guys. Go forth, script, and help others script.

The Scripting Guys explain how to determine server uptime. Mmm...uptime.

Find 21 PowerShell commands. Go!

Who said “Everyone talks about the need for new scripting tools, but no one ever does anything about it?” As it turns out, Michael Murgolo and Ed Wilson have both done something about it. Michael has released an updated version of his Elevation Power Toys (making it a breeze to run scripts as an administrator in Windows Vista), while Ed has put together the PowerShell Scriptomatic, a tool for writing WMI scripts using Windows PowerShell. Both of these utilities come highly-recommended.

Scripting Guy Ed Wilson was in Denver, Colorado, in the United States talking about Windows PowerShell to a group of Microsoft Premier customers. As luck would have it, someone happened to have a video camera, and the rest is Windows PowerShell film history. View the short-but-sweet talk. It requires Microsoft Silverlight, but you can also watch it as a Windows Media file.

Write your own WMI providers? Isn’t that, well, impossible? As it turns out, it’s not impossible. (That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s definitely not impossible.) For more information, check out this article by Gabriel Ghizila (and edited by legendary Scripting Guy Dean Tsaltas).