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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One of my main issues with attempting to identify storage on Windows Systems is that the Bus/LUN Id can be stored in multiple places, and trying to track that back to a Volume is pretty hard. So after doing some fairly deep investigation into DeviceIOControl calls to query Page 80 (Device information such as Vendor and type) and Page 83 (which returns the WWID object) I have managed to wrangle the C# into a Type usable from a PowerShell Script.

What is a WWID?

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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’ve been doing a little bit of investigation into OneNote and Word in PowerShell. So after this I got around to thinking of some of the mischievous things that could be achieved with some of the things I’ve learned… Like enumerating all documents, and in those documents enumerating all sentences, and then providing a 1% opportunity to replace its Font with Wingdings.

The following script demonstrates managing multiple threads, and managing the closure of those threads/jobs once they are complete. I’ve tested this on my C:\Temp folder with a number of documents in it, and the results are as expected. It provides some amusing opportunities for trolling.

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So, this is one of my largest PowerCLI/PowerShell scripts. This maps for each Virtual Machine, every Disk that is attached and trace back to what the LUN ID is that the disk is stored on, be it a VMDK, Thick/Thin provisioned disk, Physical/Virtual mode RDM, etc.

For the moment I will just paste the script as it stands, but I hope to return and explain some of the components.

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I’ve been busy working on a project that is implementing a SQL Geo-Cluster. One of the requirements was to modify the NIC bind order such that the order of preference is Production,Heartbeat,…,Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter. Most of this can be achieved through the Network Adapter Advanced Configuration window (Start->run->ncpa.cpl->Advanced Menu->Advanced Settings…) but the Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter is a Hidden adapter and needs to be handled separately.

The original Suggestion from the Design document is to run “wmic nicconfig get description,settingid”. This list is used to get the SettingId of the NIC where the description is “Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter”. The SettingId is then checked and moved in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\tcpip\Linkage\Bind. The line in the Multi String that equals “\Device\” needs to be moved to the last line.

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So I came across an interesting problem today while trying to dynamically load Functions using a Load-Lib function. The issue was that Loading a Script within a function means that the functions defined within that File are only defined within the Scope of the loading function. The two ways around this are to Define every Function like:

Function Global:Load-Lib { ...

Personally, I wanted my script to be the same whether I was loading it as a Global Module, or locally within a Function. In order to get the behaviour I wanted I had to redefine the functions as Global dynamically. This idea would also resolve the other issue I had: Redefining functions did not seem to always overwrite or replace the existing function code.

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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…)

I had started another post on Group Policy editing, and how the Policy files are structured, and how to use and improve on the existing Group Policy Editor tool. The post has been found to be far too epic, so I have decided to cover a smaller subset of recent finds.

As everybody is probably already aware, we use Novell ConsoleOne and Zenworks where I work. ConsoleOne has some interesting features that require that whenever a Group Policy is being edited it takes over as the policy on the machine that is editing it. Rather than have a useful tool like Microsofts Group Policy Management Console, Novell likes to replace the local Group Policy and then just run gpedit.msc. Which is where my first gripe about gpedit.msc comes in:

GPEdit.msc requires line by line entry of things like, for example, port exceptions and program exceptions for the Windows Firewall. This is usually not an issue except that, as I have discussed in previous posts, we have been moving towards a Windows Domain environment. Firewall Exception rules are configured within two places in Group Policy: Domain Profile and Standard Profile. I have found that there is a need to move our current Standard Profile settings across to the Domain Profile settings. After a bit of registry searching I found a neat trick for doing exactly that.

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