Part 1. PowerShell administration

Edited by Richard Siddaway

PowerShell is a tool for administrators enabling the automation of administrative processes. This first part of the book gives you an overview of the range of administrative tasks you can tackle and some superb examples of administering systems with PowerShell.

PowerShell remoting is fantastic for administering tens, hundreds, or thousands of remote machines. But sometimes, things go wrong. Chapter 1 will show you how to diagnose and correct problems with PowerShell remoting.

In PowerShell 1.0 we only had WMI for working with remote machines. PowerShell 3.0 introduces a new way to work with WMI on local and remote machines—the CIM cmdlets and CIM sessions, which are analogous to PowerShell remoting sessions but only for WMI access, and which are discussed in chapter 2.

How many times have you heard the phrase, “Users say that server X is running slowly”? You now need to investigate the server—chapter 3 shows you how to use PowerShell to collect and analyze the data from performance counters.

Your network is fundamental to your environment. Chapter 4 presents a set of PowerShell-based tools that enable you to investigate networking issues, such as which ports are available, and how to test connectivity by sending data to and from specific ports.