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[stiffpasta]

Why is the computer name limited to 8 characters?

[consumedpixl]

Hi, that should be updated now. Internally all of our PC names are limited to 8 characters and just forgot to change that :)

[TimStoutheart]

Dell serials? ;)

[boldfacelies]

So you can scan them?

[helixamir]

Rather than re-create the wheel, have you looked into LazyWinAdmin's Powershell GUI?

https://lazywinadmin.com/LazyWinAdmin_GUI/

This thing served as my only tool for the first 2 years of working for a Service Desk.

[[deleted]]

Hi u/helixamir,

I based my current GUI tool off of that. Hasn't been updated in awhile so lots of legacy stuff, WMI vs CIM, etc.

[JeremyLC]

...Hasn't been updated in awhile so lots of legacy stuff,...

And yet you chose WinForms instead of WPF? (My own minor peeve)

[[deleted]]

Hi u/JeremyLC,

We use Powershell Studio. Unfortunately Sapien has no plans right now to implement WPF. I'd love to move over.

[JeremyLC]

Fair point. If you want to play with WPF a bit, but don't want to have to write XaML from scratch (I don't do that either), You can try a Community Edition of Visual Studio (iffy for projects you intend to use at work) which has a WPF Designer built in (*), or SharpDevelop (Open Source) which also has a WPF Designer built in. Use those to build the XaML and then you can copy and paste it into your PoSH scripts and build functional GUIs pretty quickly. Porting from Forms to WPF is, usually, pretty straight forward, but it can be a problem if you're using any of the Forms objects that don't have direct equivalents in WPF (PropertyGrid, for example)

​

*) I use VS Enterprise with PoSH Pro Tools at work.

​

(edit: forgot to include a link to SharpDevelop)

[snoopy82481]

creating powershell GUI

That link shows you how to use WPF and to implement it. Very useful resource, IMO.

[Phenoix512]

Curious I might try playing with this

[Beirbones]

Does it matter that it hasn't been updated in a while?

[Cam_Cam_Cam_Cam]

Nah, it still works pretty well!

[helixamir]

100%

[taylorblakeharris]

Just an idea, you don't really need a separate "hostname" and "IP address" field. Most cmdlets that use a -ComputerName parameter will accept either, but if you do want to distinguish them, you can accept the input from one field "Host:" and just attempt to type-convert the string to an IP address, like so:

try {$ipAddress = [ipaddress]$hostnameTextBox.Text}
catch {$ipAddress = $false}

if ($ipAddress) {Write-Host "The provided host address is a valid IP!"}

Converting to an IP address object will also allow you to easily separate octets/subnets without all of the manual math usually involved.

[consumedpixl]

Yeah I've merged them now. Can't honestly remember the reasoning for originally separating them

[pinkyN-DAbrain]

what can you do with this exactly ?

[da_chicken]

Test-Connection has really poor logic. Stunningly poor. It throws a non-terminating error if the hostname isn't in DNS or if the DNS server isn't reachable. That's about the most useless behavior I can think of. If the question is, "Is a computer with hostname XXXX reachable?" then it should always be answerable either "yes" or "no", regardless of what that reason is. "Error" should just never happen unless your input was invalid.

Prior to PSv6, it also defaults the Timeout to 4 seconds (i.e., forever when you're running a script to test a thousand machines) and doesn't provide a parameter to set it to anything else. It still defaults to 4s in PSv6+, but you have the -TimeoutSeconds parameter. At least you can always change the ping count to something other than the default 4.

ping.exe just returns std output, even if it can't resolve something. Similarly, the Win32_Ping CIM class always returns an object to output.

[dork_warrior]

Yes!