PowerShell or QuickfixEngineering issue?

Question

This URL or KB ID (KB3139852) does not mean much: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3139852

But, if we navigate to the URL, we see more of a high-level and what the HF means: "MS16-034: Description of the security update for Windows kernel-mode drivers: March 8, 2016 "

Get-Hotfix -ComputerName $server | Select HotfixID, Caption, InstalledOn | Where { $_.InstalledOn -gt (Get-Date).AddDays(-4) } | sort InstalledOn

Even if we run with PowerShell, just Get-Hotfix, it does not provide much detail about what the HotFix means.

I would suppose that I could have PowerShell navigate to the Microsoft URL to provide the information that I am looking for, but I would think it should be labeled as part of QuickFixEngineering? Or, am I going about this the wrong way?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The funny thing about the Get-Hotfix cmdlet in Powershell is, its actually just pulling from Win32_QuickFixEngineering. So yes, you're already partially correct in thinking it should be labeled as QFE... since it is.

Doing

Get-Hotfix

and

GWMI -Class Win32_QuickFixEngineering

will give you the exact same results. It returns you the dataset from cimv2\Win32_QuickFixEngineering.

As for what is available from this under-extended part of WMI, you have the following

Name                MemberType     Definition                                                                       
----                ----------     ----------                                                                       
PSComputerName      AliasProperty  PSComputerName = __SERVER                                                        
Caption             Property       string Caption {get;set;}                                                        
CSName              Property       string CSName {get;set;}                                                         
Description         Property       string Description {get;set;}                                                    
FixComments         Property       string FixComments {get;set;}                                                    
HotFixID            Property       string HotFixID {get;set;}                                                       
InstallDate         Property       string InstallDate {get;set;}                                                    
InstalledBy         Property       string InstalledBy {get;set;}                                                    
Name                Property       string Name {get;set;}                                                           
ServicePackInEffect Property       string ServicePackInEffect {get;set;}                                            
Status              Property       string Status {get;set;}                                                         
__CLASS             Property       string __CLASS {get;set;}                                                        
__DERIVATION        Property       string[] __DERIVATION {get;set;}                                                 
__DYNASTY           Property       string __DYNASTY {get;set;}                                                      
__GENUS             Property       int __GENUS {get;set;}                                                           
__NAMESPACE         Property       string __NAMESPACE {get;set;}                                                    
__PATH              Property       string __PATH {get;set;}                                                         
__PROPERTY_COUNT    Property       int __PROPERTY_COUNT {get;set;}                                                  
__RELPATH           Property       string __RELPATH {get;set;}                                                      
__SERVER            Property       string __SERVER {get;set;}                                                       
__SUPERCLASS        Property       string __SUPERCLASS {get;set;}                                                   
PSStatus            PropertySet    PSStatus {__PATH, Status}                                                        
ConvertFromDateTime ScriptMethod   System.Object ConvertFromDateTime();                                             
ConvertToDateTime   ScriptMethod   System.Object ConvertToDateTime();                                               
InstalledOn         ScriptProperty System.Object InstalledOn {get=if ([environment]::osversion.version.build -ge ...

Which does not give you what you're looking for (A detailed description beyond what the 'Description' property gives you)

Unfortunately, I cannot do the legwork with Invoke-WebRequest behind my corporate proxy since https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3139852 requires some additional credential and proxy piping, but to no avail, there is another way to get your information.

Source:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2011/08/22/use-powershell-to-easily-find-information-about-hotfixes/

The quick rundown on getting it would be through the Win32_ReliabilityRecords class and then filtering based on the sourcename.

$i = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_ReliabilityRecords
$i = $i | where { $_.sourcename -match 'Microsoft-Windows-WindowsUpdateClient' }
$i.ProductName

# I broke it down into multiple operations to
# simplify for others

Which gives you stuff like

Update for Microsoft Office 2010 (KB2965291) 32-Bit Edition
Update for Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0 (KB2881026) 32-Bit Edition
Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime (KB3001652)
Update for Microsoft Outlook 2010 (KB3015585) 32-Bit Edition
Update for Microsoft Office 2010 (KB2956141) 32-Bit Edition
Update for Microsoft Visio Viewer 2010 (KB2881021) 32-Bit Edition
Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3006625)

Hope this helped.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you mean by "should be labeled as part of QuickFixEngineering" but if you want to retrieve the title of the update, you can do so with Invoke-WebRequest:

$ua = 'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)'
$uri = 'https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3139852'
$response = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -UserAgent $ua
$title = $response.AllElements.Where({$_.tagName -eq 'title'}).innerText

Note that I had to impersonate a crawler to get this to work, because by default it seems that Microsoft's page uses client-side javascript to populate the elements, and there is no information available to parse in the page.