2011 Microsoft Scripting Game - Advanced Leader Board

I was recently in the Scripting Guy 2011 game advanced group and placed 32nd overall. Not too bad :-) considering I didn't have enough time to finish all scripts (I've done 8 out of 10), neither did I have time to polish my scripts which costed quite a few points :-(. Nevertheless it's a great experience. I learned a lot new PowerShell techniques along the way!

2011 Advanced Group Final Leader Board

Using System Namespace In Powershell

There are many cool pre-defined constants, functions, methods, and etc. in System object. One would normally learn individual ones through sample scripts, but really should browse the MSDN page to explore what System namespace has to offer. Go to a class/structure/enumeration that you are interested, then pay special attention to those static members.

A few examples:

[System.DateTime]::Today  versus [System.DateTime]::Now
[System.String]::Empty
[System.Console]:: almost everything are static, not surprisingly
[System.Math]::PI

There are also a bunch of other namespaces, please see .Net Framework Libraries

Local Admin Account vs. account lockout

You can't really lock out an admin account - as long as you type in the correct password on *local console*, the system will unlock it automatically. This makes sense - legit users need a way to get into the system when all other credentials are failing - completely locking out all users surely won't make happy customers.

However this increases the risk of being cracked by brutalforce method. For companies who want to maximize the security and are willing to pay the cost of losing acceess due to lost passswords, there is a way to put admins under same lockout policy as ordinary users. MS has an old tool called passprop.exe that can enforce lockout policy, even against admins.

        passprop /adminlockout

This is no longer needed in Windows 2008. There are pre-define security polices in Windows 2008 will do the same.