As we have three or four times already, Jonathan and I will be recording the podcast live in front of a Ustream audience. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, please join us. We are having a tremendous amount of fun doing the live shows. The interaction that the stream enables is pretty freaking amazing. Just last week, our listeners asked THIRTY-TWO questions of our guest Jeffrey Hicks! Thirty-two!
Coming up for Episode 42 is Greg Shields and Don Jones, both respected authors and speakers in the Windows IT Pro field. Don’t miss it!
Date: 9/18/08
Time: 9pm EST (GMT-4)
Popular blogger and educator Eric Sloof of the Netherlands is at VMworld this week and he’s made some recordings and interviews while there. He has posted several on his blog:
- VMworld 2008 VMware PowerShell session video
- VMworld 2008 Interview with Dmitry Sotnikov
- VMworld 2008 Interview with Carter Shanklin
- Interview with LucD the VI Toolkit Scripting contest winner
One of the tidbits you’ll learn is that the VI Toolkit version 1.5 will include the ability to automate tasks inside of the guest operating systems! I have not had the time myself to play with this yet, I can’t wait to do so.
(edit: be sure to read the comments…and check out the Update-Tools cmdlet!)
If you already have the VM Tools installed in your guest OS, the VI Client gives you the capability to do an automated upgrade, provided the tools are of a recent enough version (3.0? 3.5? not sure). The VI Toolkit is the awesome, but there is no cmdlet included to kick off an upgrade. Luckily, it’s not hard to do.
Get-VM | % { (Get-View $_).UpgradeTools_Task($null) }
Note that the “%” is alias to the Foreach-Object cmdlet, and that even though the SDK docs say that the parameter to the UpgradeTools_Task() method is optional, I found it only worked if I stuck something in there.
The VM object returned by Get-VM doesn’t have any cool methods on it because of the way that VMware adapted the types for the administrator (you). But if you use Get-View on it, you’ll be able to use any method which is available to the “managed object”. Here’s a quote from their VI SDK about Managed Objects:
A “managed object type” is a core data structure of the server-side object model. Instances of various managed object types are referred to generically as “managed objects,” of which there are two broad categories:
- Managed objects that extend the ManagedEntity managed object type, and thus, are components that comprise the inventory of virtual components. For example, instances of datacenters (Datacenter), host systems (HostSystem), and virtual machines (VirtualMachine) are inventoried objects, and are referred to generically as “managed entities.”
- Managed objects that provide services for the entire system. Managed objects in this category enable managing performance (PerformanceManager), managing licenses for VMware products (LicenseManager), and managing virtual storage (VirtualDiskManager). These managed objects are the service interfaces for the virtual infrastructure management components.
Be sure to check out the SDK reference guide If you want to learn more about the VM managed object or the UpgradeTools_Task() method.
You can find all the details and download links on Dmitry’s PowerBlog.
Most Active Award ($500) – Adam Murray for his incredibly comprehensive SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services powerpack.
Second Most Active Award ($250) – Quintus Jones III who submitted two great powerpacks: Citrix and File Server management.
And finally… Best PowerPack Award ($500) – Jonathan Medd’s Exchange Server 2003!
Well, I think it’s really him. I can dream.
It started with a notification from Captain Hammer that the soundtrack for the awesome Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was up on iTunes (warning: link will open iTunes):
I reply and refer to a line from the show:
His reply:
That’s ok, it’s early yet, so I remind him who the hammer really is:
And then I receive a message showing what can only be Nathan Fillion’s true self:
How cool is that?
Tomorrow night at 9pm Eastern, Jonathan and I will be streaming live over Ustream. If you think you’ll make it, and you use Facebook, I’d really appreciate it if you sign up for the event I created.
This will perform a basic netstat.exe command and “objectize” its output. This version only handles the TCP stuff because I ran out of time. This needs perhaps a switch statement and a second regex to do the rest justice. Also, I’d like to see in a v2 the capability to tie process names in via the PID column and output the real process name and file info and so on. If you want to hack on it, just click on the PoshCode link below the script listing and update it in place.
Here is an example showing the obvious benefits of turning screen output into an object:
And it is back in style. Tomorrow morning (Aug 25th), the new beta for PowerShell Plus Professional 2.0 will be officially released, and it is HOT. Tobias has been working extremely hard over the past several months adding new features and tweaking the UI. He has put out an application which is very nearly perfect. I’ve had inside access and have been watching 2.0 extremely closely ever since 1.0 was out the door and I imagine he could not be more pleased and excited to be able to finally show everyone what he has been working on.
Go check it out for yourself and download the beta over at Idera.com. Here are a few screenshots to whet your appetite.
Normally I wouldn’t bother to highlight a spammer, but with powerful tools available to prevent blog post spam such as Akismet and Bad Behavior, the only spam I get lately is stuff that is manually posted by hand, or from some new bot which hasn’t been profiled yet. And of those that do make it, the destination URLs are so obvious that nobody (intelligent) would click on it anyway.
New comment on your post #77 "Episode 35 – Community Roundtable #2"
Author : podcast directory (IP: 98.148.145.202 , cpe-98-148-145-202.socal.res.rr.com)
E-mail : webmaster@www.podseek.net
URL : http://www.podseek.net/
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=98.148.145.202
Comment:
Couldn’t have said it any better
Now, some may wonder how I can be sure that this is spam. I mean, it appears to be a podcast directory which is commenting on a post about a podcast. I have to give them credit for the blog bot (or person behind it) choosing a somewhat relevant post, but in reality there are some red flags:
- The email address. Nobody uses as their personal email address “webmaster@”. And for that matter, nobody uses an email address with a hostname which begins with “www.”. However, this is not reason enough to kill this comment.
- The comment itself, “Couldn’t have said it any better”. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen this exact text in spam comments on my blog. It’s canned text from a blog spam bot, and it’s not very convincing.
- The google search “link:podseek.net” has 46 hits, many of them from the same site.
So anyway…don’t support a site which resorts to this strategy please. And I hope this mini-rant helps you to detect spam in your comments in case you had some ambiguous ones. And be sure to use anti-spam tools on your blog!
(Hyperlink removed from above…please don’t link there, they do not deserve it.)
I really didn’t think much of the Sideshow feature when I had first heard about it. But that was before I saw this:
This is very cool – you can use your Windows Mobile device to control your Powerpoint slides via Bluetooth. It basically combines the Windows SideShow for Windows Mobile preview with a SideShow gadget for Powerpoint.
To do this you will need two components:
Man, this would be awesome for doing presentations! That’s it, I gotta rebuild my laptop.
(via MR Mobile)
