Verify the role-based administration model via PowerShell

Let’s switch back to pure ConfigMgr and PowerShell this week. It will be a relatively short blog post, but in this post I’ll go through WMI and show how to get the right information about the role-based administration model. I know that this information is also available through the console, but what if I want to verify the configured role-based administration model. In that case I don’t want to go through the console, in that case I want to automate it. That way I can schedule it every now and then.

SMS_Admin

To get the information that I’m looking for I have to look at the SMS_Admin class in WMI. This class represents all the different administrative users. The first step is quite easy and straight forward, I simply get the administrative users via PowerShell by running the following command.

$Administrators = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $SiteServer ` -Namespace root/SMS/site_$SiteCode -Class SMS_Admin

This will get all the properties from the SMS_Admin class that belong to the different administrative users. For some basic checks this will already provide enough information, but there are a couple of notes:

  1. The basic information only includes a collection name and that’s not a problem, in most cases, as it’s only possible to use a collection name once, per primary site;
  2. The basic information does not include information about which security role, for an administrative user, is attached to which security scope and/ or collection.

SMS_APermission

This brings me to the next step, which is getting more detailed information. Looking at the documentation of SMS_Admin, it shows many lazy properties in this class and one of them is named Permissions. This lazy property contains an array with information of the SMS_APermission class. This describes the permissions granted to the administrative user in more detail. To get the information of this property, and the other lazy properties, I can simply run the following command per administrative user.

$Administrator.Get()

Another method to get this information directly, is to use the PowerShell cmdlets. The Get-CMAdministrativeUser cmdlet provides this information by going through these classes for me. In this case I can simply run the following command to get the same information.

$Administrators = Get-CMAdministrativeUser

In both cases the Permissions property contains the information I’m looking for and in both cases this property is set up exactly the same. This property describes the permissions granted to the administrative user in detail. The information in this property can be used to link a security role to a collection or a security scope. To differentiate between them the CategoryTypeID property is used. This property will be either 1 for a collection, or 29 for a security scope. This basically provides me with all the detailed information that I was looking for. Also, in case of multiple primary sites, this provides me with the possibility to get the collection id. The collection id can be retrieved from the CategoryID property. This property contains the collection id when CategoryTypeID is 1 and contains the security scope id when CategoryTypeID is 29.

Example

Now lets end this blog post with a small example of how these classes can be used. First of all in this example I’ll use WMI to take away the dependency of the PowerShell module. Second, this example requires two input parameters, one for the site server and one for the site code. This example will get all the administrative users and their lazy properties. Then it will go through the Permissions property and only list the permissions related to a collection, by using a check to see if CategoryTypeID is 1. At the end it will write the administrative user, the collection id (CategoryID) and the role.

$Administrators = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $SiteServer ` -Namespace root/SMS/site_$SiteCode -Class SMS_Admin foreach ($Administrator in $Administrators) { $Administrator.Get() $Permissions = $Administrator.Permissions foreach ($Permission in $Permissions) { if ($Permission.CategoryTypeID -eq "1") { Write-Host $Administrator.LogonName ` $Permission.CategoryID $Permission.RoleName } } }

Further reading

A couple articles, related to this subject, can be very helpful. Trevor Sullivan did a post about PowerShell: ConfigMgr WMI Provider (feat. Lazy Properties) a few years a go, which is still very useful. Another, good to know article, is this how-to from the ConfigMgr 2012 SDK about reading lazy properties by using WMI.

2 thoughts on “Verify the role-based administration model via PowerShell”

  1. Hi Peter,

    Thanks for this great article. I cannot access my sccm console to give the administrator permissions in SCCM. Is there anyway i can do it in powershell?

    Thanks

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.