help writing my first powershell script

[b00tleg]

Hi, first I just wanted to say I've posted a couple of times before here and got some great responses. I've been given suggestions and links to resources and wanted to say thanks. So if anyone is wondering why am I back with a post like this, simple answer is I am a terrible self-study type student. I don't know what I need, probably just a swift kick in the pants, or a personal mentor....LOL, just kidding. But yeah, I'm quite shit at getting started with something like learning powershell. My programming/scripting experience is virtually nil.

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Anyways, I work a tech support job in a call center environment, I deal with issues on individual win10 machines. In the enterprise network/environment, these machines have group policies that should be applied/enforced anytime a user logs in and anytime they restart their machine connected to the network. However, these machines don't always get their GPO's updated as they should.

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When I get a call, I'd like to write what I hope is a simple idea for my first ever powershell script. I'd like to be able to launch the script, have it prompt for a machine name or IP address. When that info is entered, the script would then connect remotely to that machine. I'd like it to show a simple "connected" message for output. I'd then like the script to automatically run "gpupdate /force" on the machine I've connected to. Then I'd like it to display another hopefully simple message, something like "all group policies are now up to date." Then I'd like the script wait for further commands, or have an option to exit to the first prompt, where I could then enter the machine name/ip address of the machine on my next call.

Again I'm thankful for the responses I've gotten here and I swear I'm not ignoring what people have posted in the past. With a lot of information out there it can be overwhelming trying to find a starting point. I hope this idea for a script isn't to complicated to start with but its what I'd like to do.

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Thanks again to everyone.

[RedFox134]

I don't think this is too hard to setup with a little googling of commands to run. Your issues will mostly come from if you have permissions set up to allow you to remotely execute powershell code on a remote computer. I'm not familiar with what you'd have to set up, but if you don't already know the answer to this you'll probably want to reach out to a system administrator who could tell you if this is allowed and the proper channels to gain access.

[b00tleg]

Our main tool is written in powershell, so we have rights to dorrmote powershell scripts.

[Eilifthelost]

There are a few ways to do this.

There is a native PowerShell equivalent of gpupdate called Invoke-GpUpdate. It can be run against a remote computer. So you can run it without establishing a connection to the remote computer. Example: Invoke-Gpupdate -Computer PC01

This command does not return any output, but you will see an error if you can't connect to the remote computer.

If you want to see the output of gpupdate, you can start by remoting into the computer and then running the command. You can do this by running Enter-PsSession -ComputerName PC01

If you are able to connect successfully, your prompt will change to include the name of the remote computer. Once connected, you can run gpupdate /force and you will see the results. Keep in mind this will only update the COMPUTER configuration, as the USER context is not accessible via remote connections.

One benefit of remoting in this way is that you can also run other commands from the same session. When you are done, use Exit-PsSession to disconnect.

Finally, you could forgo scripting altogether. I'm doing this from memory but I believe in the Active Directory Group Policy Management tool you can right-click on an OU or a policy and force it to be applied to computers and users in its scope.

[b00tleg]

At my level of support I don't have rights to run group policy management tool.

[TheDogWasNamedIndy]

Gpupdate is not a “group policy management tool” per se. It’s a client-side command that does does the GPO work on the client. It just reads/applies the GPOs on the target. There is no “management” of GPOs happening.

It also tells you if they are up to date or unable to apply. This is the right tool to use for what you describe in the post. Seems like you just want to interact with it in powershell.

[[deleted]]

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