Get-Service From All Computers in AD OU

PowerShell Help
1

Hey everyone!

I’m still a novice with Powershell but am completely hooked on the “power of the shell”! I’ve been playing around with some stuff on my network and ran across something I can’t seem to find an answer to. I know this is probably a really simple question to everyone here so bear with me.

My goal is to find all active directory machines in an OU that have the DHCP Server service running. I can run the command below and get a list returned from all the machines in the particular OU but I only get the DHCP Client service returned. I know for a fact that at least one of the servers in this OU has DHCP Server running. What am I missing?

Get-ADComputer -SearchBase ‘OU=servers,dc=MyDomain,dc=com’ -Filter '’ | Select -Exp Name | ForEach-Object {Get-Service -DisplayName dhcp}

Thanks for any and all help.

2

You’re not accessing the remote machine. Each call to Get-Service is running against the local machine as you haven’t specified the name of the remote computer.

Your code should be

Get-ADComputer -SearchBase ‘OU=servers,dc=MyDomain,dc=com’ -Filter '’ | Select -Exp Name | ForEach-Object {Get-Service -DisplayName dhcp -ComputerName $psitem }

You are looking for the DHCP server service so could make your Get-Service call

Get-ADComputer -SearchBase ‘OU=servers,dc=MyDomain,dc=com’ -Filter '’ | Select -Exp Name | ForEach-Object {Get-Service -Name DHCPServer -ComputerName $psitem }

if you wanted to cut down the return data

3

Thank you Richard!

I knew this was something simple. I’m just now beginning to understand the flow of the PS commands.

So if the $psitem basically tells the Get-Service cmdlet to access each remote machine, why was I getting a return of “DHCP Client” for each machine in the OU before?

4

So as Richard mentioned you were actually running it against the local machine easy time because you did not have the -ComputerName $psitem portion.

Basically the break down of what was happening is this:
(ol)You got a list of machines from Get-ADComputer based on your search criteria.
You reduced the selection of this to just the Name property from those objects.
For each one of those objects you ran “Get-Service -DisplayName dhcp”, which with those parameters would just run against the local machine and return the result. (/ol)

That is why you got a (i)result(/i) for each machine, you basically just used it as a counter for how many times to run Get-Service against your local machine. Assuming the machine you ran this from only has the DHCP Client service running, that should explain why you only got that as a result.

Hopefully that helped and did not make it more confusing, and if you have more questions about it we can all try to explain it differently I am sure.