Getting Started With NetCmdlets

/n software NetCmdlets are a suite of Windows PowerShell cmdlets that give you powerful network communications capabilities including network management, instant messaging, file transfer, remote execution, email management, and more. NetCmdlets is for IT professionals, developers, and power users. No programming or scripting experience is necessary.

Here are some of the cmdlets included in NetCmdlets:

• Get/Send-FTP
• Get/Send-SFTP
• Get/Send-SCP
• Get-POP
• Get-IMAP
• Get/Set-LDAP
• Get-HTTP
• Get/Set-SNMP
• Invoke-SSH
• Invoke-Telnet
• Get-S3
• And many more…

Installation

The installation of NetCmdlets includes many command line tools (cmdlets), demos, and documentation for each cmdlet. During installation you will have the option to let the setup modify your PowerShell profile to automatically import the NetCmdlets module. When the setup is complete simply open PowerShell as normal and you will have all of the cmdlets available to you.

If you wish to manually import the module instead, simply run the command:

If you wish to install the module from the Powershell Gallery, use the command:

Examples

Several demo PowerShell scripts are created in the “demos” folder of the installation. It is suggested to take a look at the demos here to get an idea of what you can do with NetCmdlets. Also be sure to look at the help file (Available as a link from the start menu, installed in the “help” folder of the installation, and available via get-help).

Here are some examples of NetCmdlet use:

Email

The Send-Email cmdlet is used to connect to an SMTP server and send emails. It supports both file attachments and HTML messages, and it will connect with any SMTP server you point it to, including secure (SSL) servers. For a full list of parameters supported by Send-Email, please see the documentation. Here is an example:

From, To, and Server are all required arguments.

There are two NetCmdlets that can be used for receiving email: Get-Pop and Get-Imap, for POP and IMAP mail servers respectively.

Plug-in your own mailserver, username, and password to get a collection of objects describing your own inbox. As with all of the TCP/IP NetCmdlets, Get-Pop and Get-Imap support connecting to secure servers using SSL. Here is an example for connecting securely to and retrieving messages from the Gmail pop server, try it with your own Gmail account:

File Transfer

There are several NetCmdlets that can be used for file transfer such as Get/Send-FTP, Get/Send-SFTP, Get/Send-SCP, Get-HTTP, and more. The most commonly used file transfer method is FTP. The Get-FTP and Send-FTP NetCmdlets are used to download and upload files from an FTP server. Below is an example of using Get-FTP to download a file from ftp.microsoft.com and then Send-FTP to upload it to another ftp server on a local network:

Network Management

Get/Set-SNMP, Send-Trap, Get/Set-LDAP, Invoke-Rexec, Invoke-Rshell, Invoke-SSH, Invoke-Telnet, Send-Syslog, Get-Packet, Get-Time, and Get-Trace are all examples of NetCmdlets that are used for network management.

Here are a few examples of common network management tasks:

To authenticate a user with your Active Directory installation:

To find SNMP enabled devices on your network:

To send commands to remote execution services:

Messaging

Besides Send-Email, there are several other “send” NetCmdlets used for inter-personal communication including Send-IM and Send-SMS. The Send-IM NetCmdlet sends an instant message using the XMPP (Jabber) messaging protocol. The Send-SMS NetCmdlet sends a mobile text message over the SMPP (SMS) protocol. These two cmdlets have very similar syntax: