My last weekly challenge to myself was to deploy google chrome with Powershell. This one was the hardest because it was hard to find the latest and greatest MSI 64 bit of google chrome. The coding wasn’t too hard after that. How google chrome works, follows suit the same way as firefox did.
We first start off getting the latest enterprise edition of google chrome. This is the 64-bit version thus the most stable version on them all. This is the version I would install everywhere in a company if I had a choice.
That’s it. Very simple very straightforward. If you need to uninstall before installing (My testing was a success with overlapping the installers) then you can do the following before Installing google chrome:
Need to deploy the latest version of firefox to 1000 machines, Here is a little powerhouse script that can do just that. It’s similar to my last script (Gimp) as it downloads directly from the web. This time we don’t have to parse out a website since Modzilla has it laid out before us.
The source is awesome. We are downloading directly from the site with their latest 64-bit product. This time we are going with the temporary file and then downloading the file with invoke-webrequest. Then we start the process of installing it with the /s flag which means silent. Since we are coming from the temp folder I threw in the runas flag to run it as the system. This way it installs for all users. Next, we set the wait flag to install the system. From everything I have read, we don’t need to uninstall the previous version to install the newest version. We do however have to stop the process that’s why we have a get process and stop process above. Finally, we remove the installer. That’s it. A lot simpler than Gimp.
The first thing we do is set up the path we want to make. Then we test to see if the path exists. If they don’t, we make them. I’m using temp in this cause because I will be deploying this to 2000+ machines. We will remove the installer afterward. I want the Temp folder to existing afterward for future deployments.
Next, we grab the URL we want to work with This is the gimp’s official download portal. This portal is by default Oldest to newest when you pull from it using Powershell.
Then we use the Invoke-webrequest to grab the website as we did in a previous post. From there we grab all of the links. In this case, since it’s a repo, they are all download links except for 2. We only want the exes of the list, so we use a where-object to find those. Then we select the last 1 as it is the newest version.
Now we need to build our URL and our Path. This is some string controls. Notice the $($Something.Something) in this code. When you deal with an array in a string and want to grab a sub item, you need to call it out with the $().
Now we want to uninstall the pervious version of Gimp. Since gimp doesn’t show up in the win32_products, we go to it manually in the file system. Newer gimps host themselves inside the program files > gimp 2. So we search to see if that folder exists with a test-path. If it does, we then check to see if gimp is running. Then kill it with fire… ok, not fire, but force. Gimp is awesome about putting an uninstaller inside the file system. So we will use that. It’s located in the Gimp 2 > Uninst > Unins000.exe. Which can be triggered with a /verysilent parameter to keep it quiet. We do this with a start process and we use a flag -wait to wait on it to uninstall.
Then we start the install of the new gimp with the start-process again. We use the Download Name we made eailer with an argument list of /verysilent /norestart /allusers and a -wait.
In this article, I will guide you through the process of deploying webroot via Group Policy. This is a fairly straightforward process with only a little editing of the MSI. I am assuming you know how to download the MSI from the webroot portal. The portal changes often, so, I will leave this part out. If you are ready, throw on your group policy pins, and let’s get started.
Super Orca
The first thing you will need is the Super Orca. You can download it here, link. Once you get super orca installed, we will be able to download and set up the webroot MSI.
Open Super Orca
Open the Webroot MSI.
Click the Property On the left (Red Block).
Click GUILIC (Green Block)
Enter the Key Number
Click File
Click Save As
Save as a different name. ALWAYS KEEP THE ORIGINAL!
Shared Folder
Now you have the MSI ready. You need to place it into a shared folder location. This location has to be accessible to every computer in the company as a minimum of read-only. Make sure the share is shared! I can’t tell you how many times I made this mistake. If it’s shared, good, make sure some of the clients can reach it.
Group Policy
Now we have the MSI ready to go. It’s time for the group policy. It’s a very simple computer policy. In my experience, a lot of IT managers don’t want AVs on servers. So, this tutorial will include a wmi filter. Let’s get to it.
Open Group Policy.
Create a new policy and name it Workstation Webroot Deployment
Enter: select * from win32_operatingsystem where producttype = 1
The numbers mean:
Workstation
Domain Controller
Server
Click Ok
Under the WMI Filter Select the WMI Object.
All that is left is linking the GPO. Now you can link it wherever you want. Most orgs have an OU just for workstations and one for servers just for this case. It doesn’t matter where you link it the WMI filter will ignore servers and only hit the workstations.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to ask. If you ever see anything that is wrong, feel free to reach out and correct me. Thank you for reading.
Here is a little powerhouse script I wrote to audit the mailbox sizes. The focus recently is to see who’s mailbox sizes are about to be over and if it’s the deleted folder. I can’t show you all of the scripts, but I can show you part of it. This part will pull the data down in such a way that you can view the mailbox sizes, who has the largest mailboxes, what folder is the largest in those mailboxes, and what their deleted folder is sitting at. Let us take a look at the script itself.
The Script
function Get-SHDEXOMailboxSizeAudit {
[cmdletbinding()]
param (
[pscredential]$Credential
)
Begin {
#Installs required modules
Write-Verbose "Installing required modules"
if (!(Get-InstallEdModule ExchangeOnlineManagement)) { Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement }
Write-Verbose "Checking and importing required modules"
# Starts importanting required modules
if (!(Get-Command Connect-ExchangeOnline)) { Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement }
}
process {
#Connecting to exchange. Grabing credentials.
if (!($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Credential'))) {
$Credential = (Get-Credential)
}
Connect-ExchangeOnline -credential $Credential
#Grabs all the mailboxes at once. As this report will look at all the mailboxes.
$Mailboxes = Get-Mailbox
#Starts looping through each mailbox
For ($M = 0; $M -le $Mailboxes.count; $M++) {
Write-Verbose "Gathering Info on: $($Mailboxes[$M].UserPrincipalName)"
#Grabs the mailbox stats.
$Stats = Get-EXOMailboxStatistics $mailboxes[$M].UserPrincipalName
$FolderStats = Get-EXOMailboxFolderStatistics $mailboxes[$M].UserPrincipalName
#Starts looping through those folders to get their sizes.
$MainFolderStats = foreach ($Folder in $FolderStats) {
$FolderSize = [math]::Round((($Folder.FolderSize.split('(')[1].split(' ')[0] -replace ',', '') / 1gb), 2)
[pscustomobject]@{
Name = $Folder.name
Size = $FolderSize
}
}
#Adds this information to the mailbox object
$Mailboxes[$M] | add-member -Name "Statistics" -MemberType NoteProperty -Value $Stats
$Mailboxes[$M] | add-member -Name "FolderStats" -MemberType NoteProperty -Value $MainFolderStats
}
#Creates a return value.
$Return = foreach ($Mail in $Mailboxes) {
#Starts looking at mailboxes that are not the discovery mailbox.
if (!($mail.UserPrincipalName -like "DiscoverySearchMailbox*")) {
#Grabs the deleted folder as that is a folder we want to see in this report.
$Deleted = $Mail.FolderStats | where-object { $_.name -like "Deleted Items" }
#Grabs the largest folder. If it's not the deleted folder, then we might want to increase their mailbox sizes.
$LargestFolder = $Mail.FolderStats | Sort-Object Size -Descending | select-object -first 1
#Doing some math on a string. The string format (# bytes). Thus, we work the string to get the bytes. Divide and round.
$Size = [math]::Round(($Mail.Statistics.TotalItemSize.value.tostring().split('(')[1].split(' ')[0].replace(',', '') / 1gb), 2)
#Grabs the mailboxes percentage.
$DeletedToMailboxPercent = [math]::Round((($Deleted.Size / $size) * 100), 0)
#Outputs the data to the return value.
[pscustomobject]@{
DisplayName = $Mail.Displayname
UserPrincipalName = $Mail.UserPrincipalName
MailboxSize = $Size
LargetsFolder = $LargestFolder.Name
LargetsFolderSize = $LargestFolder.Size
DeletedItemSize = $Deleted.Size
DeletedToMailboxPercent = $DeletedToMailboxPercent
}
}
}
#Disconnects exchange
Disconnect-ExchangeOnline -confirm:$false > $null
}
End {
$Return | sort-object MailboxSize -Descending
}
}
The breakdown
First this script is designed to work on powershell 7. It will not work on powershell 5.
The first part we come to is the [pscredential] object. Notice it’s not mandatory. Notice no pipelining either. I have found PS credentials pipped intend to do very poorly. So, it’s simple, bam wam done.
Begin
Inside our begin tab, we have the module setup. We check installed modules for exchangeonlinemanagement. if it’s there, we ignore it and import the module, if it’s not we install it. Same way with importing. If it’s imported, then we do nothing, if it’s not, we import it.
Process
Next, we grab credentials if need be and connect to exchange. We use the get-credential command to grab the credentials. Then we use the connect-exchangeonline command to connect to the exchange online.
Once we are connected, the magic can start. This is the sweetness of this script. The first step is to grab all of the mailboxes at once with Get-Mailbox. Then we start a loop, not any loop, a for a loop. Wait! David, WHY A FOR LOOP! It’s simple, we want to add information to the index. So, we need to be able to call the index. We use the Get-EXOMailboxStatistics and choose the userprincipalname of the index we are looking for. We do the same thing with Get-EXOMailboxFolderStatistics. These gives us some clear stats we can use later on in the script. Now we loop through the folder stats that we just collected and math ourselves some bytes to gb. See the output of the get-exomailboxfolderstatistics looks like “24mb (#### bytes). So we need to filter that out and get the ####. I use a split to do this. I split out the string at the ‘(‘. This way, the bytes are on object 1. Then we split it again by the space. Now the bytes are on the 0 object. Then we replace the ‘,’ with nothing. Now we divide all that by 1gb to convert it to gbs. Then we drop that all into the mainfolderstats. Next, we add all of that information into the mailbox variable we created before this looping madness using add-member. We are adding it as a noteproperty.
Now we have prepped our data, it’s time to sort it. We start the loop once more, but this time it’s simple for each loop as we don’t need the array index value. We first grab all the deleted items folder. Then we grab the largest folder using the sort-object command on the size object of the folderstats note property that we made in the last step. Then we do some math. Like before to get the mailbox overall size. Finally, we grab the deleted mailbox percentage with a little more math. This time its percentage math. Now we have all of this useful information we use our pscustomobject and put it all together.
Then we disconnect using the disconnect-exchangeonline command.
End
Finally we display the return information inside our end tab. We sort the object by the mailbox size in a descending order.