Looking for a list of cmdlet properties with explanations

PowerShell Help
1

Hello,

I’m looking for an official resource that can explain or define the properties of a given cmdlet. Currently I’m working with the Get-ADComputer cmdlet, which has properties for IPv4Address and Network Address.

I’m not sure if Network Address refers to the Network address of a given subnet (whereas IPv4 would refer to the host address on that given subnet).

For questions like this it would be great if there was an offical reference of some kind I could read. The help files seem to focus more on parameters instead of properties.

Thank you for your help and let me know if I’m not following proper rules for this forum. Newbie at Powershell and first time posting here.

Thanks again!

2

Well, the properties of an ADComputer object wont be referred in the cmdlet help documentation.
AFAIK, its just pulling what is available in the AD database. The only document I could find is

ADComputer Class (Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management) | Microsoft Docs

3

AFAIK there is none.

AFAIK there is no property Network Address. Even the example in the documentation does not show this property. At least I cannot reproduce such an output.

AFAIK is the property IPv4Address - together with others - a convinience the PowerShell team implemented for administrators as there’s actually no such attribute in the AD object you query. The cmdlet does implicitly query the DNS for this information.

4

The cmdlet uses DNS to retrieve this property. It’s not an AD attribute:

3 Likes
5

Thanks to everyone for responding. You’re right. Running the following one-liner:

Get-adcomputer -identity <computer name> -properties * | gm

Does not produce a network address property, but:

Get-adcomputer -identity -properties * | select ipv4address, networkaddress

will produce a distinct address different from the expected ipv4 address. Olaf and matt-bloomfield’s explanation seems the most likely for why it’s appearing in my work’s production environment.

My boss suggested it’s a network ID, but that’s unlikely because the addresses reside within the same host-address range of a subnet – weird. In some cases, the networkaddress property produces two address separated by a comma!

Hopefully, I’ll make contact someday with someone from our network team to explain this oddity. It might be a clue to the project I’m working on.

Regardless, thanks for the insight and for the technet link that matt-bloomfield found. I appreciate it.

6

The two properties you’re referring to are different.
If it’s set, IPv4Address should be the current IP address of the computer e.g. 10.100.100.24.
The networkAddress attribute should be the subnet address, e.g. for the IP address 10.100.100.24 and assuming it’s a /24: 10.100.100.0.

I’m not sure what service(s) can update the networkAddress attribute but it can be multi-valued. If you’re using laptops which roam between WiFi networks, wired connections, and VPN then having more than one value doesn’t seem unusual.

The DNS query for IPv4Address only shows one IP address so even if your DNS records aren’t being updated/scavanged and you have multiple DNS entries for the same host, you’ll see only one address in that field.