I saw this one on the VI Toolkit forums today and had to pass it on.  Someone who goes by ade.orimalade@e-mis.com writes:

$cluster = "< >" # Enter the required cluster name

$installerArgs = ‘REBOOT="ReallySuppress"’

Get-Cluster -Name $cluster | Get-VM | % { (Get-View $_).UpgradeTools_Task($installerArgs) }

So the key is to provide that REBOOT=”ReallySuppress” line to the UpgradeTools_Task() method.

We will be having Ed Wilson, one of Microsoft’s Scripting Guys on the show THIS WEDNESDAY Nov 19th @ 9:30PM EST.  We will start the live broadcast at 9:00 PM EST.

Live show: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/powerscripting-podcast

Hope to see you there!

Jon Walz and I were interviewed recently on TechNet Radio. We talked about 2008 R2 and community resources.

Ok—technically, I’m still a human. but I am big on the PC thang.

For various reasons which may become apparent when you view my example feed, I needed to generate an RSS feed using PowerShell.  I was somewhat surprised to find that it had not been done before-at least not well.  There’s an example on the net having to do with Exchange, and it was helpful, but it was very specific to its task which was not my task.  So, I made a generalized script which can be reused for anything.

Usage:

   1: $feedItems = @(

   2:   @{

   3:     Title = 'feed item 1'

   4:     Link = 'http://halr9000.com/link/1'

   5:     Author = 'Hal Rottenberg'

   6:     Description = '<h1>Introduction</h1><p>This is can be a full blog post.</p>'

   7:     pubDate = get-date

   8:   }

   9:   # each hashtable is an item...

  10: }

  11: $feedItems | New-RssFeed -path 'c:\wwwroot\feed.rss' -title 'site title' -desc 'this is my site' -url 'http://halr9000.com'

Here’s an example: http://halr9000.com/test/feed.rss

Code:

I’d appreciate it if you were to fill out this short survey. It will help PowerShellCommunity.org as a non-commercial organization decide how best to expend time and money to help get the word out about PowerShell and to help people learn PowerShell.

I haven’t written any non-PowerShell posts lately, as some may have noticed.  The weather is great today, and I’m home working on my book, and before I got into it I thought I’d spend a few paragraphs sharing some things I’ve been playing with lately.

Live Mesh

Available at mesh.com, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s sync platform which they seem to have a lot of great plans for. We’ll see. In the meantime, the desktop client makes a solid folder sync / p2p app so I’ve been using it for a while to sync my PowerShell profile across multiple machines. Just this past week at PDC, Microsoft released a new version of the client (ooh and added some videos), and has added a Windows Mobile app as well.  I’m underwhelmed so far, but I’m actually still interested so will continue to play with it. In particular, I’m a bit inspired by what Dale Lane is doing with it on his eighty-million devices.

Wakoopa

I just found this social network site Wakoopa which tracks what software you use and—not sure what else yet. I saw it linked on Dale’s blog, so thanks twice over, buddy.  As most of you know, I’m a hardcore software junkie, so this is right down my alley-wick, to mix a metaphor.  I’ve just started setting up a profile, we’ll see if I remain interested in it.

StackOverflow

I setup a profile on StackOverflow when it was still in closed beta, and I’ve been visiting the site pretty regularly ever since. It’s a Q&A site, somewhat like Expert Exchange, but it’s very lightweight  in feel, yet heavy on the web 2.0 GUI stuff, which I like. The site is aimed (heavily) towards developers, but I’m finding that PowerShell is fitting pretty well so that works for me.

New Toys?

I’m thinking of getting two toys for Christmas (they’ll really be sort of for/from my wife and vice versa, not sure who will get more time on which):

• Chumby – a cute little net-enabled streaming music box with widgets and alarm clock features
• iPod Touch – well, everyone knows what these are

Music

As always, you can find the music I’ve been listening to lately on Last.FM. Some notables:

• New and old Metallica
• Irish & Celtic music (thanks Oisin!)
• and a ton of other stuff

This function is a wrapper for the Invoke-SSH cmdlet which is included in the Netcmdlets package. I don’t care for its output or syntax complexity, so I made this to suit my needs.

Usage:

Invoke-SSH <server> <PSCredential> [$true|$false] <command>

Example:

PS > Invoke-SSH myserver $root ‘ls /’ | select -first 3
root@myserver # ls /
bin
boot
dev

From the SMUG blog:

The Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for November 14^th, 2008 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking, at the Alpharetta Microsoft Campus.

REGISTRATION LINK

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=5B-11-D1-1D-08-92-D8-84-78-E1-CD-6A-5C-13-92-AA&Culture=en-US

DATE & TIME

November 14^th, 2008
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

I’ll be there with bells on.  Or something.

This is a user group at which I presented an Intro to PowerShell class a few months ago. If you are in the Atlanta area and like what you see in the agenda, be sure to come on by.  The RSVP link is not up yet, but watch the SMUG homepage for more details.

I’m trying to drag my buddy and co-host Jon-the-PowerScripting-guy along with me.

Here’s the agenda:

P.S., there will be free food!

This one isn’t by me but by Hugo Peeters from the Netherlands. You know he’s from there because they tend to use too many vowels for some reason. 

I like how his article on configuring the license server doesn’t assume much and walks you through the process.

If you like working with VMware and PowerShell like I do, be sure to follow his blog.

RSJ asked on the VI Toolkit forums, “Get-View and New-Object - how does it work?”. Here’s part one in what probably won’t become a series because if it did, I wouldn’t have time to finish my book! But you never know, I might finish it up. This is the beginnings of a good primer though, so it’s good to have people see it.

Cmdlets are the highest level of interface with .NET objects which PowerShell provides. VMware knows more or less what VI admins need to do their jobs. They have a goal of enabling admins by creating cmdlets for as many usage scenarios as they can. Time and money of course are limiting factors, and so version 1 came with a certain set of cmdlets. It was seen that this wasn’t good enough, and that there needed to be a way to access the full SDK to do the low level stuff for which they did not yet have time to fill out with cmdlets. Thus, Get-View.

Get-View deals with server-side objects represented by the VI web service (and documented in the SDK). With it, you can do anything that the VI Client can do, and more. It’s more complicated to use, of course, and in fact, it’s not a lot simpler than writing a "full" program using a language like C#. But it’s not bad, relatively speaking.

You can pass several different kinds of "automation objects", those which live in your PowerShell session, to Get-View and voila, you now have a new object which has a richer set of methods and properties. However, this only works for "managed objects" (and not directly for all of them), which are only one type of object represented in the SDK. This leaves "data objects" totally left out, and they are important, too.

New-Object has nothing to do with the VI Toolkit, it’s a cmdlet which comes with PowerShell. Its used to give you the ability to access a .NET (or COM) object which is stored in an assembly (fancy name for a DLL). One thing you can do with it is to create these data objects. The data objects are often used as specifications to methods. This basically works like a giant bundle of arguments to perform a single action.

This will grab the contents of all of the log files on your VirtualCenter server. Normally there will be eleven of them: logs zero through nine are rotated through at each service startup, and the index umm, I forget what’s in it.  Anyway, here you go:

$log = Get-LogType | ? { $_.key -match "vpxd" } | % { Get-Log -Key $_.Key }

You may have to be patient. This took 175 seconds to run on my box.

And here’s how to get at the contents:

PS > $log[0].Entries | select -first 10
Log for VMware VirtualCenter, pid=1484, version=2.5.0, build=build-104215, option=Release, sec
tion=2
[2008-10-04 09:36:07.703 'App' 268 info] Current working directory: C:\WINDOWS\system32
[2008-10-04 09:36:07.703 'Libs' 268 info] HOSTINFO: Seeing Intel CPU, numCoresPerCPU 1 numThre
adsPerCore 2.
[2008-10-04 09:36:07.703 'Libs' 268 info] HOSTINFO: This machine has 1 physical CPUS, 1 total
cores, and 2 logical CPUs.
[2008-10-04 09:36:07.703 'App' 268 info] Log path: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Applica
tion Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs
[2008-10-04 09:36:07.703 'App' 268 info] Initializing SSL
[2008-10-04 09:36:08.093 'Libs' 268 info] Using system libcrypto, version 90709F
[2008-10-04 09:36:17.109 'App' 268 info] Vmacore::InitSSL: doVersionCheck = true, handshakeTim
eoutUs = 30000000
[2008-10-04 09:36:17.343 'App' 268 info] Starting VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.0 build-104215
[2008-10-04 09:36:17.453 'App' 268 info] Log directory: C:\Documents and Settings\Default User
\Local Settings\Application Data\VMware\vpx.

@Phactotum writes:

I have a list of servers and groups, and I need to add the domain group to the servers local administrators group. I figured out if I do the following I can do a single server group combo:

([ADSI]"WinNT://Server/Administrators,group").add("WinNT://Domain/Group,group")

And I found that I can use import-csv to show me my CSV file. I just can’t figure out how to get the server name and group name plugged into the command I want to run.

I thought this was a good question so I figured I’d address it here. The first thought I had when I saw this was, “Whew! I don’t have to come up with the ADSI code”.  That particular API is horribly picky and the objects it returns are quite awkward to use. Jeffrey Hicks has seemed to make good use of them, I think he may know something I don’t.

Anyway, my solution to the problem involves what is probably lesser-known feature of PowerShell called named scriptblocks. Ther’es three of them, Begin{}, Process{}, and End{}. Here’s the script:

Process {

    $Server = $_.Server

    $Group = $_.Group

    ([ADSI]"WinNT://$Server/Administrators,group").add("WinNT://Domain/$Group,group")

}

So you would save this as a script (or put it into a function) and call it like this:

Import-Csv file.csv | .\Modify-LocalGroups.ps1

So this is an elegant and easy to read way to solve the problem.  An alternate way would involve making a foreach-object loop and do everything inside the script. I like using the named script blocks though because that allows you to keep the input separate from the working part of the script.

There was a problem with the network in the office this morning. Rather than sit there staring at the screen, I decided to write a script that would let me know when things were back up. In my case, the indicator would be when the DHCP server gave me an IP, because that was the primary symptom—no IP.

Here’s the script. You will have to modify the Get-WMIObject query results to point to your NIC as that will vary per computer.

$nic = gwmi Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | ? { $_.IPEnabled }
while ( $retval -ne 0 ) {
    $retval = ($nic[0].RenewDHCPLease()).ReturnValue
}
Write-Host `a`a

In case you haven’t tried it, “`a” is the escape code for BELL which causes your internal PC speaker to go beep. This is really loud on many computers. 

Also, “?” here is a built-in alias to the Where-Object cmdlet.

I’m very thrilled to announce that Microsoft and the MVP community have accepted me into their ranks under the Admin Framework category. This is in recognition of my PowerShell work in the community. I’m already on a mailing list with all sorts of cool stuff in it about Posh v2 which I can’t share, which is cool and not cool at the same time! 

A big thanks to all those who have congratulated me on twitter and elsewhere. I promise to use my powers for good (or for awesome, as Strongbad would say).

If you do, then drop everything and go check out the website of Hugo Peeters. I had subscribed to his blog some months ago but then got behind on all of my blog reading due to my book project. I had a spare moment today to scan some feeds and I learned that Hugo has been putting out an incredible number of example scripts.

I like to put script samples out there myself, and I’ve done so on my blog, but its really hard for me to find the time lately to do so. It’s really great to see that Hugo has the time, because he’s really contributing the community in a big way.

Here are some sample posts that caught my eye:

• Virtual Center Server Settings revealed by Powershell
• Set-SoftPowerOff
• Getting Started with the VMware Update Manager Powershell Snap-In

Thanks, Hugo!

[pasted from a Facebook update I received 9/27/08 at 9:55pm]

Dear Pandora fans -
We urgently need your help! We need you to make a phone call to support internet radio.
After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, SoundExchange and the RIAA are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and internet radio. But just as we’ve gotten close, large traditional broadcast radio companies have launched a lobbying campaign to sabotage our progress.
Yesterday, Congressman Jay Inslee, and several co-sponsors, introduced legislation to give us the extra time we need but the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which represents radio broadcasters such as Clear Channel, has begun intensively pressuring lawmakers to kill the bill. We have just a day or two to keep this from collapsing.
This is a blatant attempt by large radio companies to suffocate the webcasting industry that is just beginning to offer an alternative to their monopoly of the airwaves.
Please call your Congressperson right now.
Call 202-225-3121 and ask for your representative.
Ask them to support H.R. 7084, the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. Congress is currently working extended hours, so even calls this evening and over the weekend should get answered.
Thanks so much for your continued support!
Tim, and the whole Pandora staff

This script is a generic wrapper for the While statement that will execute a condition a given number of max tries, waiting a given number of seconds in between.

This example will execute the “IsItDoneYet” function (that checks a hypothetical external factor) once every 5 seconds, a total of no more than 24 times, which will take approximately two minutes, not including function execution time.

PS > $condition = { IsItDoneYet }
PS > WhileTimeout 5 24 $condition

download | new post

Episode 41: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/episode-41-jeff-hicks-i-am-ironman/

• Interview with author and scripting guru Jeffrey Hicks aka Mr. Roboto (aka Iron Man apparently)
• Analysis of the VMware powershell contest winners
• Data visualization with PowerShell and Excel

Episode 42: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/episode-42-with-greg-shields/

• Interview with Greg Shields, author and Terminal Services MVP
• New PowerGUI version
• PowerShell + SQL Server
• PoshBoard
• Managing VMware with PowerShell videos from VMworld
• Cmdlet of the week: Stop-Process

And see the show notes for Episode 42 for how to win a free book from SAPIEN Press!

• Web: http://powerscripting.net
• RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Powerscripting
• Add to iTunes: pcast://feeds.feedburner.com/Powerscripting
• Mailing list: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=697655

And last but most definitely not least, we are streaming the podcast live, Thursdays at 9pm EDT, please come check it out.  If you listen to Episode 41 you’ll hear how much interaction the live listeners have with the show.

• Live stream and chat room: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/powerscripting-podcast
• Add to calendar: http://tinyurl.com/4l2t2f