As I said in my previous post, PowerShell - Why won’t my scripts execute?, Microsoft Powershell is becoming the way to script and automate tasks in Windows. If you haven’t used PowerShell before, you should definitely look into it. PowerShell has been around for a while in various forms, since mid-2006 approximately.

Exchange Server 2007 is one of Microsoft’s most popular products and it makes extensive use of PowerShell cmdlets. In fact, there are many tasks you can’t do in Exchange Server 2007 without using cmdlets so if you have Exchange 2007 installation and administration in your future (or your present!) you need to know this stuff. For now though, I’m going to concentrate on the PowerShell basics by writing a script that shows the status of Microsoft IIS running on a selected machine. It’s not designed to show anyone anything about IIS at all but simply to demonstrate PowerShell basics - please see the URL above if you want details on IIS itself.

So, let’s jump straight in. The script you can see below simply checks the status of and displays a very basic report on 4 of the main IIS services - IIS Admin, World Wide Web Publishing Service, FTP and SMTP. Note that your installation of IIS may have some, none or all of these services so you’ll need to modify the list of services to check to suit your needs. The script is heavily commented so you should be able to work out which line to change (hint: it’s line 81!). Enough mucking about - here’s the script.

# Windows Powershell script to show the status of IIS6+ (HTTP only, doesn’t include FTP or SSL)
# The script has been written using PowerShell functions to make the whole thing shorter
#
# Checks for the IIS Admin, World Wide Web Publishing Service, FTP Publishing Service, NNTP and SMTP services
#
# Chris Rasmussen, March 2008

# be tidy - clear the screen
cls

# show a welcome message
write-host “IIS6+ Status Summary”
write-host “——————–”
write-host “”

# this function accepts the name of a service (either the display name or short name) and the name of a machine to check
# the services on the specified machine are enumerated to see if the specified service exists
# if the service does exist the status is checked
# if the service does not exist an appropriate error is displayed
function checkService ($serviceName, $machineName) {

# do some very basic error checking
if (($serviceName -eq $null) -or ($machineName -eq $null))
{
write-host “Service or machine name missing. Please correct and retry.”
}
else
{
# use the .NET abilities of PowerShell to get a list of all services that match the service name we’re looking for
# note that we are checking both the short and display names, i.e. you can check for either
# e.g. “iisadmin” and “IIS Admin Service” will both work
$serviceResults = [System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController]::GetServices($machineName) | where{ (($_.name -eq $serviceName) -or ($_.displayname -eq $serviceName))}

# check to see if the results is an empty object
# if it is empty the requested service wasn’t found
if ($serviceResults -eq $null)
{
# the service wasn’t found so set the result to an empty string (it’s used later)
$isServiceFound = “”
}
else
{
# the service was found so get the service’s name
$isServiceFound = $serviceResults.name
}

# check to see if any service names were returned
if ($isServiceFound -eq “”)
{
# the service wasn’t found
$resultDisplay = “Not found”
}
else
{
# the requested service was found so get its status
$serviceStatus = get-service $isServiceFound
$resultDisplay = $serviceStatus.status
}

# return the result of the service check
if ($resultDisplay -eq “Running”)
{
# it is running so display an appropriate confirmation in normal text colour
write-host “$serviceName : ” -noNewLine
write-host $resultDisplay
}
else
{
# the service isn’t running to display a warning in red text colour
write-host “$serviceName : ” -noNewLine
write-host $resultDisplay -foregroundColor(’red’)
}
}
}

# this line dynamicaly loads the .NET assemblies into memory so they can be used by this script
$loadAssemblies = [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(’system.serviceprocess’)

# setup the list of services we want to check
# modify this array to suit your needs
$serviceList = “IIS Admin Service”, “World Wide Web Publishing Service”, “msftpsvc”, “smtpsvc”, “nntpsvc”

# loop through the list of services and check then report on the status of each one
foreach ($serviceEntry in $serviceList)
{
# try and get the service’s status (if it exists)
checkService $serviceEntry ‘localhost’
}

# not important, just for clean-screen reasons again
write-host “”

To run the script you’ll need to have PowerShell installed - it can be downloaded from the Microsoft Powershell website and you’ll need to have the execution policy set so that scripts can actually be executed. My previous article, PowerShell - Why won’t my scripts execute?, covers how to do this.

The full script above can be downloaded by clicking here.

Enjoy!

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Scripts, Scripts - PowerShell