Get-ADComputer: Getting AD Computer Objects Data Using PowerShell

We continue to study useful PowerShell cmdlets to retrieve information from Active Directory. In one of the previous articles, we talked about Get-AD User cmdlet, which allows you to get any information about AD user accounts. Today we’ll discuss the Get-ADComputer cmdlet and how to use it to get various information about the computer accounts (servers and workstations) in the Active Directory domain.

Let’s set a practical task: using Powershell you have to get a list of computer accounts not registered in the domain network for more than 120 days (inactive computers) and disable them.

Before using Get-ADComputer cmdlet, you have to import Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell with the command:

Import-Module activedirectory

Get-ADComputer – Cmdlet Syntax

You can get help on Get-ADComputer cmdlet parameters as usual with Get-Help command:

Get-Help Get-ADComputer

To get information about a specific computer account in the domain, specify its name with -Identity parameter:

Get-ADComputer -Identity SRV-DB01

We need to know the date of the last registration of this computer in the AD domain, but this information is not displayed in the output of the command. Let’s display all the available properties of the computer object in Active Directory:

Get-ADComputer -Identity SRV-DB01 -Properties *

As you can see, the last logon date of this computer to the network is specified in the attribute LastLogonDate – 09/21/2015 0:20:17.

Remove all unnecessary information leaving only values of Name and LastLogonDate attributes.

Get-ADComputer -identity SRV-DB01 -Properties * | FT Name, LastLogonDate -Autosize

Then you have to modify the command to make it display the information about the time of the last network registration for all computers in the domain. To do it, replace –Identity to -Filter:

Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Properties * | FT Name, LastLogonDate -Autosize

To display the information about the computer objects in a particular OU, use the SearchBase parameter:

Get-ADComputer -SearchBase ‘OU=Paris,DC=woshub,DC=loc’ -Filter * -Properties * | FT Name, LastLogonDate -Autosize

Sort the query results by the date of the last logon using Sort command.

Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Properties * | Sort LastLogonDate | FT Name, LastLogonDate -Autosize

So, we have got the list of computers and the date they last logged on to the Active Directory domain. Now we want to disable the computer accounts that weren’t used for 120 days or more.

Using Get-Date we can get the value of the current date in the variable and reduce it to 120 days:

$date_with_offset= (Get-Date).AddDays(-120)

The resulting date variable can be used as a filter of Get-ADComputer query in LastLogonDate field:

Get-ADComputer -Properties LastLogonDate -Filter {LastLogonDate -lt $date_with_offset } | Sort LastLogonDate | FT Name, LastLogonDate -Autosize

So we have created a list of inactive computer accounts that have not been registered for more than 120 days. Use the Disable-ADAccount command to disable them.

Now you can disable all inactive computer accounts:

Get-ADComputer -Properties LastLogonDate -Filter {LastLogonData -lt $datecutoff} | Set-ADComputer -Enabled $false

Get-ADComputer: Real World Examples

Below are some more useful examples of using the Get-ADComputer cmdlet to query computer objects in the domain.

To get the number of all computer accounts in Active Directory:

Get-ADComputer -Filter {SamAccountName -like "*"} | Measure-Object

List the computers whose names start with LonPC:

Get-ADComputer -Filter 'Name -like "LonPC*"' -Properties IPv4Address | Format-table Name,DNSHostName,IPv4Address -Autosize

To select all workstation computers running Windows XP:

Get-ADComputer -Filter {OperatingSystem -like '*XP*'}

To select only Windows Server computer objects:

Get-ADComputer -Filter { OperatingSystem -Like '*Windows Server*' } -Properties OperatingSystem | Select Name, OperatingSystem | Format-Table -AutoSize

Get the list of servers in the domain with the version of the OS and the Service Pack installed:

Get-ADComputer -Filter {OperatingSystem -Like '*Windows Server*' } -Property * | Format-Table Name,OperatingSystem,OperatingSystemServicePack -Wrap -Auto

To delete all computer accounts that have not been accessed the domain for more than 6 months, you can use the command:

Get-ADComputer -properties lastLogonDate -filter * | where { $_.lastLogonDate -lt (get-date).addmonths(-6) } | Remove-ADComputer

To select disabled computers in the specific OU use the command:

Get-ADComputer -filter * -SearchBase "OU=Computers,OU=Berlin,dc=woshub,dc=loc" | Where-Object {$_.enabled -eq $False}

The results of the command can be exported to a plain text file:

Get-ADComputer -Filter { OperatingSystem -Like '*Windows Server*' } -Properties OperatingSystem | Select Name, OperatingSystem | Format-Table -AutoSize C:\Script\server_systems.txt

Or a CSV file:

Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Property * | Select-Object Name,OperatingSystem,OperatingSystemServicePack | Export-CSV All-Windows.csv -NoTypeInformation -Encoding UTF8

To perform a specific action with all the computers in the resulting list, you must use the Foreach loop. In this example, we want to create a list of servers in the domain and request specific information from each server (the list should contain the server name, manufacturer and server model).

$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter {OperatingSystem -Like '*Windows Server*'}
Foreach ($Computer in $Computers)
{
$Hostname = $Computer.Name
$ComputerInfo = (Get-WmiObject -Computername $Hostname Win32_ComputerSystem)
$Manufacturer = $Computer.Manufacturer
$Model = $Computer.Model
Write-Host "Name: $Hostname"
Write-Host "Manufacturer: $Manufacturer"
Write-Host "Model: $Model"
Write-Host " "
$Content = "$Hostname;$Manufacturer;$Model"
Add-Content -Value $Content -Path "C:\PS\ServersInfo.txt"
}

You can use a shorter loop syntax. Suppose you need to run a specific command on all computers in a specific OU (in this example, I want to run a group policy update command on all servers):

get-adcomputer -SearchBase "OU=Servers,DC=woshub,DC=loc" -Filter * | %{ Invoke-Command -Computer $_.Name -ScriptBlock {gpupdate /force} }