Leveraging WMI Scripting: Using Windows Management Instrumentation to Solve Windows Management Problems (HP Technologies)

This book is the second one dedicated to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) scripting. In the first book, Understanding WMI Scripting (ISBN 1555582664), we discovered the Windows scripting environment and the WMI architecture with its set of supported tools. We also learned the WMI Query Language (WQL) and the WMI COM Scripting API in order to understand the various WMI scripting techniques.

In this second book, which continues the WMI discovery started in the first book, we dive deeper into the WMI world to understand the real-world manageable entities of the Windows world. Basically, we discover in a structured way the most important WMI providers available from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003 (including Windows 2000 and Windows XP). This discovery will extensively use the knowledge gathered throughout the first book to build real-world scripted management solutions. As with the first book, this second book dedicated to WMI is based on an important concept: learning by practice. Based on your previous experiences with WMI, if you understand the WMI concepts and have mastered the WMI scripting techniques related to the WMI data retrieval and WMI events monitoring, you can use this second book on a standalone basis. However, if you are new to the WMI world, I strongly recommend that you start with the first book to gather a base knowledge about WMI.

The information contained in this book is organized in six chapters.

• Chapter 1 covers the WMI providers discovery. The chapter explains how the WMI providers are registered in the CIM repository and how to locate them by scripts. This WMI providers discovery technique will be quite useful in understanding the WMI providers capabilities with the WMI classes they support. This technique will also allow you to discover any new future CIM extensions by yourself and to understand some aspects of the available WMI providers that are not always documented in the Software Developer Kits (SDK). Although we will not dive into the WMI providers implementation in depth, it is useful to understand their capabilities, since they also determine the behavior of the WMI classes they support.

• Chapter 2 covers everything that is related to the Win32 providers. In this chapter, and based on the knowledge acquired from the first book, we will discuss how to retrieve hardware information from the system, customize the page file, the operating system settings, and the system registry to name a few examples. Basically, we will discuss how to manage from WMI scripts everything that is related to the core operating system settings.

• Chapter 3 covers all WMI providers that are part of the core Operating System WMI installation. For instance, we will see how to script on top of the WMI classes supported by the Active Directory providers, the SNMP providers, the forwarding event providers, and the Trust monitoring providers, to name a few. By examining the provider capabilities and the classes they support, we will see how they can be used to develop WMI scripts directly applicable in the field for day-to-day management tasks.

• Chapter 4 is related to the WMI security enhancements and the WMI security scripting techniques. In this chapter, we will discuss how security descriptors are structured and how to script them to manage the security settings. This chapter is one of the most complex chapters, since it covers a difficult topic, which consists of manipulating Access Control Lists (ACL) and Access Control Entries (ACE) of the security descriptors protecting access to the manageable real-world entities. We will see how to retrieve, decipher, modify, and update from WMI and ADSI scripts the security descriptor of file system objects, Active Directory objects, Exchange 2000 mailbox, registry entries, and WMI namespaces created in the CIM repository. This chapter also contains some hints related to the Internet Information Server (IIS) configuration when running ASP WMI-enabled scripts. Last but not least, due the security push made by Microsoft in early 2002, we will see how Windows Server 2003 has been updated regarding the WMI security and how this initiative affects people scripting on top of WMI.

• Chapter 5 is related to the optional components of the Windows platform and Windows applications supporting WMI. Under Windows Server 2003, optional components, such as Terminal Services (TS) or Network Load Balancing (NLB), come with a WMI provider to extend their management capabilities from WMI. We will also consider the most common Windows applications, such as Internet Information Server (IIS) version 6.0, Exchange 2000, and SQL 2000. This chapter will also discuss the Enterprise Management Solutions that also offer some WMI support as providers and as consumers. This includes, for instance, HP OpenView Operation Manager for Windows (OVOW) version 7.0 or Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) version 1.0. The chapter also considers the WMI support regarding the Microsoft .NET Framework. Because the scripting techniques are extensively described in the previous chapter, this last chapter will only focus on the functional aspects supported by the WMI providers with their related classes.

• Chapter 6 finishes this book by giving some hints about the WMI scripting future. What's coming up? What will the Windows management and scripting future look like? Of course, the goal is just to share a view of this possible future, since Microsoft could reconsider any features during the development phase.

Last but not least, this second book contains more than 250 script samples. They can be downloaded for free from http://www.LissWare.Net.

Now, let's dive further into the WMI discovery by examining how to locate and understand the WMI providers capabilities available under Windows.