A Kick butt tool

OK, so as you all might know I have been stumbling on new cool command line techniques on the Windows platform. It started with the SANS 560 class, but has run beyond that now. I am an avid follower of Ed Skoudis' Command Line KungFu blog as well. Ed, and others bring out a lot of cool ways to do things from the command line. It is very pen tester centric but I find that it comes in handy in other places as well.

To get more to the point, yesterday I had to pull a list of emailboxes of a certain size from a Microsoft Exchange server. Sure I could have opened Exchange System Manager, but the command line junkie in me said "there has to be a better way". So I started doing a little bit of searching. Quickly I came across how to do this with PowerShell. I though, man if only I could use PowerShell to get this and other things done in an pure XP/2003 environment.

Guess what? Not only can you install PowerShell on XP, but I also found this kick butt addon that will probably make any Windows admin out there drool, especially if they are constantly having to pull reports from AD, Exchange and systems in general.

Scoot on over to PowerGUI.org. This handy tool gives you a nice little GUI to store and retrieve all of your precious PowerShell scripts. The IDE in it even does the recognition of keywords, sorry not a programer to remember what they call that. Basically if you start to type a word and it matches a known command it will give you the listed matches to autocomplete for you. All nice right?

The next good thing is the PowerPacks! There are PowerPacks for all kinds of stuff and growing. I found a PowerPack for Exchange 03. Found a PowerPack for AD that not only allows me to save off nice querries for reports but also lets me restore deleted items from AD! You read that right. Bring those users back with the same GUID and SID! This is freakin awesome because you used to have to pay for that handy feature. There are PowerPacks for OCS , SQL, Citrix and more. It is a community based project so there is lots of colaboration and sharing going on. The thing not to forget is that it is all just an IDE for PowerShell scripting. Add you own, share what you have done, try the shared objects.

I thought all of the remote desktops apps I found the other week were kewl, but it turns out that outside of security land, this is the coolest app I have seen in some time that actually helps out on the job.