DSC Overview
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Desired State Configuration (DSC) allows you to manage your Windows Servers with configuration as code. You can do things like creating files, installing or uninstalling Windows Features, and much more. If you run the PowerShell command “Get-DscResource” you can see all of the resources you can interact with and configure with DSC.
We are going to use DSC to uninstall the vulnerable SMBv1 feature that comes on Windows Server. We will use a DSC to push the configuration to our desired clients, and from then on DSC will continue to uninstall SMBv1 if it ever gets installed again later.
DSC is supported by almost all modern Windows operating systems. An exact list is shown below:
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2012R2
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
- Windows 10
- Windows 8.1
- Windows 7
In this section, we will be setting up a DSC Push architecture which is the simplest and quickest way to get started using DSC. Here are a few terms you should be familiar with before getting started:
- Configurations - The PowerShell scripts that configure instances
- Resources - What you’re configuring on the target computer (file, log, Windows feature, etc)
- Local Configuration Manager (LCM) - The LCM is responsible for implementing your configurations
You can view your LCM settings on your computer by running the following administrative PowerShell command prompt: Get-DscLocalConfigurationManager.
You might find it surprising that you don’t have to install the LCM. That’s what makes using the DSC Push architecture so great. It takes pretty much no setup at all to get started.
We are going to use the task of disabling SMBv1 to familiarize ourselves with DSC.
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