Question

I have what should be a simple script that will connect to all the servers in a domain and build a table of all the services running on each server. However, when I try to automate the script to grab all the servers in a foreach loop I get an RPC error. If the $name variable is replaced with the server DNS name everything works as expected. I’ve checked the firewall and DCOM services on my system (win7) and the servers (2000 – 2008R2) and these are all enabled or disabled appropriately. So, I’m thinking something in the script is broke. I’m still learning powershell, so any tips are appreciated.

Here is the script so far.
$servernames = get-adobject -Filter ‘ObjectClass -eq “Computer” ‘ -Searchbase “OU=Servers,DC=E,DC=BENEFIS,DC=ORG”

 foreach ($name in $servernames) {
        Get-WMIObject win32_service -computername $name -Property      SystemName,Name,StartName,StartMode | 
        Format-table SystemName, Name, Startname >c:\serverservices.txt }

Answer 1

Each object you get back have a name property so you need to pass its value to the ComputerName parameter. In addition, to get computer object use the Get-ADComputer cmdlet, you also need to specify the Append switch when you export to the file otherwise content will be overwritten and what you’ll see finally is the output of the last computer only.

$servernames = Get-ADComputer -SearchBase "OU=Servers,DC=E,DC=BENEFIS,DC=ORG" -Filter *

foreach ($name in $servernames) 
{
        Get-WMIObject win32_service -computername $name.Name -Property SystemName,Name,StartName,StartMode |
        Format-table SystemName, Name, Startname | Out-File c:\serverservices.txt -Append
}