Checking up on my daily emails, I see my usual AV report. I open it up to see a who’s the bad surfer, turns out only one system. And it turned out to be the new temp we hired. I didn’t expect him to actually go to any bad sites, didn’t seem to be the type, so I quickly viewed the infected file.
Turns out the file specified was from an old user profile, of someone who used the system before him… making me wonder how many old profiles are on his system. I’m a systems admin who prefers to get some things done without affecting other peoples work. I manage to do these with different remote applications. Most of these applications share the users screen and allow taking over of the system. This still interrupts the user, so often I resort to sysinternals psexec.
So I wanted to find out how I could enumerate a list of local profile accounts on a system via command. Doing a bit of research showed this to not be as easy as I had expected (was hoping for a simple wmic command). As it turns out sometimes I forget I’m stuck in the past and should really get with the times, old way…
Which is from 2005, thankfully Since Vista they introduced a new class to handle these. 😀 Check out this post for more info.
Easy Peasy way using Win32_UserProfile class and PowerShell 😀
To Paraphrase to solution:
1) Open PS in elevated mode.
2) gwmi win32_userprofile -co $REMOTESYSTEM | ft sid, localpath -a
3) Where gwmi = Get-WinObject | Win32_UserProfile is the class | -co is the remote system attribute | |is the pipe | and ft is format table
4) Note as with all object based programming/applications This can be very easily used to manage user profiles as well, ex:
5) (gwmi win32_userprofile -co Server1 | where {$_.LocalPath -like '*\cjohn*'}).Delete()
So that’s it! Ever since Vista managing user profiles has become a breeze and no longer requires intensive scripting to be managed remotely! Thanks MS you finally did something right!