Dwarfsoft [GPA]

I was attempting to get a cloned configuration on Brocade switches as part of a PowerShell script that is adding Aliases and Zones to the Active Config. The original code that created the tasks to be run on the Brocade switch required 2 separate calls to PLINK in order to get all its information. The first was a call to cfgactvshow, and the second was a call to alishow. I knew there had to be a better way, so I developed the following one liner for cloning the active zone configuration based on our standard rules:

zoneobjectcopy "`cfg=\`cfgactvshow|grep "cfg:"\`;echo ${cfg:6}\", \"${cfg:6}_\`date +\"%Y%m%d%H%M%S\"\``"

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I finally got around to fixing one of my biggest bugbears in PowerShell ISE 2.0, and when I did so I found on our new management server that it was broken for PowerShell ISE 4.0. I’m talking about Command Transcription. One of the most useful things I use in my day to day work is Start-Transcript for the standard PowerShell Shell. I have it automatically start in my PowerShell Profile so I can always go back and find how I achieved a particular goal.

I don’t use PowerShell ISE often, but when I do it’s usually because I am researching how to get something to work, or doing a colorized copy of the code for documentation purposes. For a long time I was happy enough with the suggested “Start-iseTranscript” provided by the Scripting Guy Blog.

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So we had some Blade Chassis and implemented some Firmware upgrades. Surely this should not impact the blades themselves, or the OS on which they run? You’ve got to be kidding right. As soon as the Blade Chassis firmware has been upgraded we lost all four Broadcom NICs, and we had four new Broadcom NICs added in their place. This means that any IP Configuration has been lost and so has, in our case, Team configuration. Due to the four original NICs being removed, their Connection Names have also become unusable, because there are hidden devices that are still using those names.

Firstly, how do we remove devices via PowerShell. The Answer can be found on any Windows 7 workstation in the C:\Windows\Diagnostics\System\Device\CL_Utility.ps1. There is a function there called RemoveDevice.

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I will start out by simply stating how much I HATE SEP11, and how it handles client scan logs. For some reason there is NO way of getting a client scan log out of the Central Management Console. The whole point of Central Management is being able to … manage CENTRALLY.

Anyway, enough rant. I wrote a batch file to pull the latest (or specified) log file from a list of servers (in a file called Servers.txt). More Source: (continue reading…)

Recently I have been working on some rather complicated projects preparing our SOE to move from Novell eDirectory to an Active Directory environment. One of the packages I built was required to run periodically and so I set up a Scheduled Task to accomplish this. Rather than introduce a security risk by creating a new Administrator Account I just created the scheduled task to run as the local SYSTEM account. It turns out that the SYSTEM account does not have as much access as I required, especially when managing user registry hives.

After quite some time looking in to how to achieve my goal I came up with a rather simple, yet ultimately hacky, solution. Give the SYSTEM Account Administrative Privileges.

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I have recently been having a look into determining the Last Login Time of a user for a BGInfo implementation. Firstly I had a look at the getCurrentUserLastLoginTime script suggested for use with BGInfo. The limitation of this script, however, is that it will reset the login time to the last time the Windows login box was Authenticated against, which also includes the time that the workstation was unlocked.

In order to maintain current BGInfo information the implementation is running periodically, so this is unnacceptable. Therefore I had to work to resolve the issue manually. As I have had a fair bit of experience with Windows Profiles recently (see the last blog post) I was familiar with the ProfileLoadTimeHigh and ProfileLoadTimeLow registry keys in the ProfileList. So I set out to determine how to actually use these to determine the login time. I first wrote some code to get the User SID based on the users “%userdomain%” and “%username%”:

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I have been a little preoccupied of late, and this is due to some of the most hectic things requiring my attention, and therefore interrupting my development attempts.

First, I have been travelling a fair bit for my wife, as we are getting many scans and specialist appointments. The pregnancy has not been going as well as it could have been, but at least things are looking positive now. Understandably the requirement to have enough “stuff” set up for baby, who should be here very soon, has taken much of my time.

Secondly, the job in which I am currently sitting has been advertised for Permanency. This of course requires my time for writing the application. Hopefully the fact that I sit in the position currently will put me in a good position, especially considering in the current economic climate that there might be the newly skilled unemployed seeking to get into my role.

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Interesting moves happening at work. Today I moved into a Networks role. Originally it was intended that I be doing 80% Servers and 20% Networks due to the solid input I have provided within the Server team to date. This has now been changed to 80% Networks and 20% Servers. The guy who I am filling in for didn’t like the idea of his role being technically abandonned, and I agree with him. There will definitely be some Server Action from my end anyway, because I have a keen interest in running with a few ideas.

Trav and I have approached the Server team with an idea on distributing apps more effectively, relying mainly on network addresses of the PCs to correctly locate an application server. This brings up a few logistical hurdles. (continue reading…)