Using command line to see if a given computer's local guest account is disabled

Question

I need to generate a report that shows the guest account is disabled for a given list of computers.

How can I use net user, powershell, or any other commonly used tool for this purpose?

Solution 1

Here's a little PowerShell function to check for this.

function Test-LocalAccountDisabled
{
    param (
        [string]
        $AccountName = 'Guest',
        [string[]]
        $ComputerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME
    )

    $AccountDisable=0x0002
    foreach ($Computer in $ComputerName)
    {
        [ADSI]$Guest="WinNT://$Computer/$AccountName,User"
        if ($Guest -ne $null)
        {
            New-Object PSObject -Property @{
                Disabled = ($Guest.UserFlags.Value -band $AccountDisable) -as [boolean]
                AccountName = $AccountName
                ComputerName = $Computer
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Write-Error "Unable to find $AccountName on $Computer."
        }
    }
}

If you have a list of computers in a text file separated by line breaks, you could do something like

Test-LocalAccountDisabled -ComputerName (get-content computers.txt)

Solution 2

PowerShell is probably the easiest way:

foreach ( $computer in (Get-Content computers.txt) ) {
  Get-WmiObject Win32_UserAccount -Computer $computer -Filter "Name = 'guest'" `
    | Select-Object __Server, Disabled
}

Using wmic in batch is ugly, but will work as well:

set query=useraccount where name^^="guest" get disabled

for /f %c in ('computers.txt') do (
  for /f "delims== tokens=2" %a in ('wmic /node:%c %query% /value') do (
    echo %c %a
  )
)

Comments

[Jerrish Varghese]

Nice solution. I suggested a couple of edits (adding __Server to know what machine the account status was coming from in the case of checking multiples and using the pipe as the line continuation rather than the backtick.

[Jerrish Varghese]

Steve, rather than using the foreach, you can pass all the computer names to the -computername parameter. You could add __Server to the output so that the user knows which machine the account report is coming from.

[Steve G]

Ahh.. yes. You are correct!

[Ansgar Wiechers]

@StevenMurawski Thanks. I'm aware that a pipe at the end of the line would automatically continue the line, but I prefer to escape the line break and put the pipe at the beginning of the next line. That way I can see immediately where a command is continued from the previous line. I didn't know about __Server, though. Thanks for the tip, that's much more convenient than @{n=computer;e={$computer}}.

[Jerrish Varghese]

You bet. The backtick at the end of the line can sometimes throw people off, so that's why I recommended that change. No worries. Rather than using the foreach, you could just pass the whole (Get-Content computers.txt) to the -computername parameter. That would let all the queries go at once rather than queuing them up in a line. If you have a number of machines, that will perform better.

[Juanjo Daza]

I don't have a disabled property for any server I query.

[Jerrish Varghese]

What version of PowerShell are you using? V1, V2, or V3?

[Juanjo Daza]

2.0 on Win7 via function Ver { get-host | select version }

[Jerrish Varghese]

Interesting. I do get output objects on my Win 7 test machine. How are you trying to call the function?

[Juanjo Daza]

hmm this works: Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_UserAccount -Computer hostname -Filter "LocalAccount='$true'"|Select-Object Name,Disabled|Format-Table -AutoSize .. do you know how I can have 2 filter statements? && doesn't work. I'd like to add the "name" parameter?

[Jerrish Varghese]

the filter is a wql query, so you have to use "and" It would look like "LocalAccount='$true' and Name like 'Guest'"