Leveraging WMI Scripting: Using Windows Management Instrumentation to Solve Windows Management Problems

by Alain Lissoir

Overview

Leveraging WMI Scripting is the second in a series of two books dedicated to WMI. Understanding WMI Scripting (ISBN 1-55558-266-4), Lissoir's first book, explained to Windows Administrators the various WMI scripting techniques and manageability capabilities of this new Windows Server 2003 platform. Illustrated with hundreds of scripts and detailed tables, the book explained the underlying technology and how WMI can be put to work. Lissoir focused not only on WMI programming aspects for developers but on how administrators can use what is available in Windows for their admin work.

If you've had significant WMI experience, or have read Lissoir's first book, you are ready to apply your WMI knowledge to any technology that interfaces with WMI. Leveraging WMI Scripting continues the presentation of WMI begun in Understanding WMI Scripting. In this new volume, we dive deeper into WMI to understand the manageable entities of the Windows world. Lissoir offers a structured description of the most important WMI providers available from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003 (including Windows 2000 and Windows XP). This covers the WMI management of the Windows Registry, Active Directory, SNMP, the Resultant Set Of Policies (RSOP), and the Volume Shadow Service to name a few. This discussion leverages the information on building real-world scripted management solutions presented in Lissoir's first book. Like the first volume, Leveraging WMI Scripting is based on an important concept: "learning by practice."

Leveraging WMI Scripting addresses the most advanced topics so that you can exploit the features of various WMI interfaces to manage the components in a real-world environment. WMI is a critical topic under Windows Server 2003, so this book provides real added value to every Windows administrator.

· Shows you how to extract data from applications, understand what's really happening on your servers, and get real work done
· Provides hundreds of usable scripts to use in everyday solutions for network performance and security
· Offers practical and straightforward advice that any enterprise Windows administrator can learn from

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780080510125
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	05/29/2003
Series:	HP Technologies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	918
File size:	84 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alain Lissoir is a member of the Technology Leadership Group within HP Consulting and Integration. He works primarily on Directory and Scripting technologies. Alain has delivered Directory Integration workshops and seminars for the Windows Mail&Messaging World-wide Practice. Today, his focus is in the areas of the Active Directory and Windows scripting. He is the author of Windows 2000 Magazine articles about the Active Directory Schema and several other publications about scripting technologies available under Windows 2000/Windows.NET (WSH and ADSI) and Exchange 2000 (WSH, CDOEX, CDOEXM and WMI).

Read an Excerpt

WMI beyond basics to implementing and managing critical issues and applications scripts with WMI

Table of Contents

The Windows WMI Providers Discovery; The Win32 Providers; The WMI Providers; WMI Security Scripting; The Optional Windows Components and Application WMI Providers; A Look Into the Future of WMI Scripting

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

WMI beyond basics to implementing and managing critical issues and applications scripts with WMI

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
If you are new to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), you should begin with Alain Lissoir's Understanding WMI Scripting. Once you are familiar with WMI, this excellent book is what you need; it will help you make the most of what you already know and stretch your expertise into very useful dimensions. Leveraging WMI Scripting is chock-full of examples and scripts to help you build your own scripted management solutions. It also includes an appendix with scripts.

Chapter 1 of the book covers the WMI providers discovery: how to locate and understand the WMI providers capabilities available under Windows. Next, Chapter 2 details everything that is related to the Win32 providers. Chapter 3 examines all WMI providers that are part of the core Operating System WMI installation. Then, Chapter 4 looks at WMI security enhancements and security scripting techniques. Chapter 5 is related to the optional components of the Windows platform and Windows applications supporting WMI. Next, Chapter 6 finishes the book by giving some hints about the WMI scripting future. Last but not least, you get more than 250 script samples.

The usefulness of WMI scripting in administering a Windows environment is undisputed. The security capabilities alone are worth their weight in gold. This outstanding book is without doubt the best way to make yourself a master of the technology. John Vacca

John Vacca, the former computer security official (CSO) for NASA's space station program (Freedom), has written 38 books about advanced storage, computer security, and aerospace technology.

"WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is a black hole to many Windows administrators, yet it is a hidden jewel that can be exploited with a little effort to automate and improve common system management tasks. Getting information about WMI scripting, the applications that support WMI, and how to approach bringing it all together to make things happen are some of the reasons why administrators don't use WMI. Alain Lissoir's books cover WMI in depth for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 in a highly approachable manner."—Tony Redmond, VP and CTO, Hewlett-Packard Consulting and Integration Services.

From the Publisher