Checking if computer does not exists

PowerShell Help
1

We have thousands of systems and delete them after not talking to sccm’s heartbeat usually, but with that sccm keeps the computer in its database for 30 days or so. So when we push a patch/program we will have computers that are not getting it, because they no longer exists. I pull the listing of computers from sccm and then run them against Get-ADComputer in a script.

The script runs but i want the if statement to check to see if it is null else “blahh” and it does, but it sends the common error of unable to find the computer. I want it to check then go into my “if” statement not just display the error.

if ((Get-ADComputer “$comp” ) -eq $null){…}

Thanks for the help

2

Hello Eric,

A possible solution for you would be to trap the exception thrown by Get-ADComputer and remove the device from SCCM in the catch block.

Example:

$ComputerName = ‘MyTest’
$Domain = ‘viamonstra.local’
try
{
Get-ADComputer -Identity $ComputerName -Server $Domain
}
catch [Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.ADIdentityNotFoundException]
{
Write-Verbose -Message (‘Device “{0}” not found in Active Directory domain {1}’ -f $ComputerName, $Domain)
Write-Verbose -Message (‘Removing device “{0}” from SCCM’ -f $ComputerName)
…
}

Best,
Daniel

3

Try something like this

$ErrorActionPreference = ‘SilentlyContinue’
if (-not $( Get-ADComputer -Identity “bleh”)){ Write-Host “Doesn’t exist”}
$ErrorActionPreference = ‘Continue’

You can get the if statement to do whatever you need.

The important part is remembering to reset the ErrorActionPreference variable.

4

That worked perfectly. Does the variable “ErrorActionPreference” work different than the common parameter “-ErrorAction”? Thanks for the help.

5

That looks good, I will have to look into it a lot more (just starting to learn powershell).

Thank you for your help