PowerShell v3 and new features including DNS Server cmdlets

With the introduction of PowerShell v3 in Windows Server 2012 we now have a new collection of cmdlets to play with, and amoung them are a collection of cmdlets for controlling and administering DNS Server.

As someone who's been rewriting many old batchscripts to use PowerShell, and is also in the process of migrating to a new 2012 DNS setup this obviously came as great news. No more using PowerShell as a wrapper for dnscmd or having to dig into WMI calls. Unfortunately as is often the case being up to date has its drawbacks, yep, you guessed it, there's a definite drought of documentation out there explaining how to use it all. There are other additions as well, but DNS Server's the area I've been playing with recently.

For a straight forward list of DNS cmdlets check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj649850%28v=wps.620%29.aspx. Once you know which cmdlet you need the easiest option is perhaps to use the Commands menu within the PowerShell v3 ISE, which if not already displayed on the right hand side can be viewed by selecting View and then Show Command Add-on.

Using the new commands menu definitely helps, for any cmdlets you haven't used before. Selecting the DnsServer option from the modules list gives you a list of the available cmdlets in that category, and selecting one of them displays the parameter details for it. Note, where the options change depending on what you're doing (for instance using Add-DnsServerResouceRecord, where A records have different options to MX records etc), you'll see tabs along the top to allow you to select the required set of parameters. Simply fill in the required text boxes, and then click Insert, the complete PowerShell command line using those parameters will be created in the bottom window. Either run it there or copy and paste the code into your script.

If you're unsure which details need to go into which box, the -WhatIf parameter will let you know what your current selection would do if it was run (without actually doing it and potentially doing something wrong / unexpected). The WhatIf parameter isn't new to v3, but its combination and availability in the commands menu makes it even more useful. One thing worth noting about the -WhatIf parameter is that it gives an overview of what will happen, not always the exact detail. Take the following example :

Add-DnsServerResourceRecord -DomainName mail.domain.com -Name _autodiscover._tcp -Port 443 -Priority 0 -Srv -Weight 0 -ZoneName foo.com -WhatIf

The output produced will be :

What if: Adding DNS resource record _autodiscover._tcp of type SRV in zone foo.com on MYSERVER server.

You'll see that it confirms the command will create the resource record, that it's an SRV record, where it is and in which zone, but not the finer details. So if you put the port details in the wrong place then WhatIf won't help.

That's enough for now, the next couple of blogs will be looking at specific DNS Server cmdlets and how they can be used.