I.T. Proctology

Traversing time with PowerShell

2012-01-27T09:38:00.001-08:00

My first title for this was “the PowerShell time machine” because the article is about TimeSpan and managing time using TimeSpan. Most folks are familiar with Get-Date. Get-Date is all about ‘now’ – it is always now. Which is great, if you are running a script and want to know at some point in the script what the time is ‘now’, such as before entering a loop of some type. Frequently I need

psbase.gettext(1) I love you

2012-01-17T08:57:00.000-08:00

I have had many cases to do things in PowerShell where I am manipulating CIM or WMI objects. Getting CIM/WMI objects and querying information from them is never a big deal, however modifying an object and then trying to send it back to a method to cause some setting change has always been a pain. When you get a CIM/WMI object with PowerShell, PowerShell treats it as an object, where in actuality

Ubuntu Desktop 10.11 on Hyper-V piix4_smbus

2011-12-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

So, I needed a small virtual machine that had the Hyper-V Integration Components working it (I need the clean shutdown action). XP is just too large, but usually works well. Linux, why not. And the RedHat family just incorporated the latest of the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components. Perfect. Now, the flavor. RedHat? No, no license. Fedora? Well, now that I think of it, I forgot this one

Provisioning Server (PVS) Cache on device issues

2011-12-16T14:45:00.000-08:00

I recently ran into some issues streaming VMs and taking advantage of the local storage on the hypervisors for the local cache. Many of these issues were due to my lack of experience with the product, so I am making notes here for future use. First, if you are not familiar with Provisioning Server or have not taken a look at it for a few revisions, go download the latest version. There have

Changing a VM vNIC MAC from dynamic to static

2011-12-15T11:57:00.001-08:00

Through my VM creation exercise I am taking advantage of Hyper-V and its practice of assigning MAC address from a pool so that I don’t need to manage all that in my script. Well, if you have not noticed, I have Provisioning Server in my environment. And that means that I need to have static MAC addresses. And I am using Export and Import to copy my MasterVM. This means that I cannot set the

Dealing with the Hyper-V default MAC pool

2011-12-15T11:26:00.001-08:00

This is my little hack around dealing with the Hyper-V default MAC address pool range. If you have been following, I have a bunch of virtual machines that I am creating. And it is important that each has a unique MAC address. Here is where software behavior gets into my way. By default a Hyper-V Server MAC address range is only 255 MAC addresses ( 00 – FF ). But a Hyper-V server can support

Modifying Hyper-V Server settings with WMI

2011-12-15T11:10:00.001-08:00

Here is a little thing that I recently put together to modify Server level settings of my Hyper-V Server. Most of my focus so far has been on the VMs themselves, why not tweak the server? Why might you need to change settings of the Hyper-V server itself? Um, because you can, and therefore you should. You might need to change the MAC address range, or the default path, or some other crazy

Making VMs highly available with PowerShell

2011-12-15T08:27:00.001-08:00

If you have been following you will know that I have a bunch of copies of a MasterVM. These were created using Export / Import so they are all nice and tidy in their own folders on the same volume. If your target volume was a CSV (Cluster Shared Volume) then you are all set for this one and are ready for a multi-node cluster. If your destination was not a CSV, but possibly another local volume

Joining PVS target devices to the domain

2011-12-12T11:58:00.001-08:00

In my last post I created a bunch of PVS target devices (the VMs that I previously copied from my MasterVM). I now want to have Provisioning Server create the Active Directory computer accounts for the VMs and do its magic of making each VM a unique machine without requiring sysprep – this is a nifty feature. In my last post I imported the PVS cmdlets (MCLI) so I won’t repeat that step. $

Linking VMs to copies of the PVS Collection Target Device template.

2011-11-28T08:45:00.001-08:00

This is all about taking a Target Device Template that exists within a Provisioning Server (PVS) Farm Collection and copying it to create target devices from a bunch of VMs. If you have been following I took a MasterVM on a Hyper-V server and I copied that into a number of differently named / unique virtual machines (this includes local cache VHD and settings). And then I cycled through

Hyper-V WMI powering on VMs and getting MAC addresses

2011-11-22T11:52:00.000-08:00

Previously I have written about formatting MAC addresses from Hyper-V WMI into a format to be consumed by another program and about duplicating a Master (or Template) VM into multiple virtual machines. Today I am going to put that together and produce an output that contains the each VM as a name, mac address pair in an array. My Master / Template VM has the MAC address set to dynamic, so

Copying a MasterVM into many with Hyper-V WMI

2011-11-17T14:08:00.001-08:00

Now, I am not going to take any credit for this little and brilliant piece of PowerShell. All the credit goes to Taylor Brown. Back many moon ago Taylor was publishing a bunch of PowerShell scripts that use the Hyper-V WMI interface to do things. (In more recent times Ben Armstrong has taken up this task) Taylor’s original post is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/taylorb/archive/2008/06/07/

Hyper-V WMI MAC address to a different format

2011-11-14T07:55:00.001-08:00

Here is a simple one that I don’t want to lose. In my previous post I had mentioned how to get the MAC address that is assigned to the vNIC of a VM. Get the VM, then find the associated vNIC (and make sure the VM is running): $vm = Get-WmiObject Msvm_ComputerSystem -Filter "ElementName='$vmName'" -Namespace "root\virtualization" -ComputerName $HyperVHost $vnicEmulated = $vm.GetRelated("

Hyper-V WMI association NULL returns and stopped VMs

2011-11-11T10:28:00.001-08:00

I spent way too much time staring at this today until it dawned on me that my VM might need to be running for certain associations to be activated and working. All I was trying to do is to get a PowerShell script to return the MAC address of the Legacy Network Adapter of a VM. Ben Armstrong has been more than generous at giving samples to the community and the updated associations sample (that

A dollar for your error

2011-11-02T11:37:00.001-07:00

Last week I was trying desperately to understand why something was failing in a PowerShell script of mine. I am still trying to figure a good way of understand what the problem is, but I ran across a nifty PowerShell feature that I had never heard of before. $error $error is a nifty thing. It is an array with methods. Within your script or session it is always capturing your error messages

Editing a web.config using PowerShell–adding a node method 2

2011-10-27T16:04:00.001-07:00

InnerXML is your friend to add a bunch of XML quickly. The bit of XML that I want to add to my web.config is: The super duper easy way is to simply dump in your XML as text. Begin by reading in your XML file

IIS PowerShell and Type Mismatch when Set-Item

2011-10-25T13:44:00.001-07:00

If you cannot tell I have been doing a lot with PowerShell and web sites (IIS) lately. Let’s just say that it is amazing what you can do with an Azure Web Role when you get creative and are not afraid of scripts. Oh, and since this is Azure, it is IIS 7. A couple time now I have run into an error with IIS where I am unable to apply settings using Set-Item. The error I get in return is

Setting the WinRM HTTPS listener

2011-10-21T15:28:00.001-07:00

A recent puzzle of mine has been to configure the HTTPS listener for WinRM. You might ask; why? Because it is supported! And you supposedly can. This applies to both WinRM and PowerShell remoting. I say “supposedly” because this has been a messy trip. And all of the documentation has been of nearly no help, leading me to believe that it is just supposed to work and I must be an idiot for it

Editing a web.config using PowerShell–changing a value method 2

2011-10-17T09:22:00.001-07:00

A few days back I had a post about changing a value of an XML document in which I treated the returned item as and array and simply looped through the array. I have had a reason to handle things a bit differently. Lets consider the same bit of XML. However, this time lets treat this like an object. The first thing is to fetch the XML element in a way that PowerShell keeps it as an element.

Finding files with PowerShell without ‘and’

2011-10-10T09:54:00.001-07:00

There is simply something intrinsically simply about using a selection statement with an “and” in it. I constantly want to select for a file using a where clause with an '”and” – where just does not like this. The error that I get each time I try and do this is: “Unexpected token 'and' in expression or statement.” To get around that I started using a double pipe. Now, I have to admit, I am

Editing a web.config using PowerShell–adding a node method 1

2011-10-05T10:43:00.001-07:00

This is an extension of a recent bunch of posts about XML and handling XML in PowerShell. One way of adding a node and content can be accomplished by building the node out of XML objects. Some might consider the the true ‘object’ way of working through this problem. The bit of XML that I want to add to my web.config is: <

Editing a web.config using PowerShell–changing a value

2011-10-03T12:03:00.001-07:00

It has been some time since I have been working with XML using PowerShell. I needed to refresh my brain and work through some issues. In bunches of searching I ran across only one article that really tries to explain what is going on: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/powershell/powershell_xml.aspx And coupling this understanding with Tobias Weltner’s chapter on XML starts to put the pieces

The Cloud–a place for my stuff

2011-09-08T15:13:00.001-07:00

I keep trying to come up with new ways to describe clouds and what it means to run things in the cloud and to do things in the cloud. To quote a really old George Carlin skit; a place for my stuff. “That is the whole meaning of life, to find a place for my stuff”. In the cloud world there are private places and public places. A private cloud is a cloud that you are responsible for. A public

How to ask a question in a technical forum

2011-09-06T15:55:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine recently ran across this and forwarded it to me. Personally, as a TechNet forum moderator, and frequent forum contributor, and as a person who handles a few forums for my employer; I find the information in this KB both lighthearted and highly useful at the same time. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375 The title of the KB article: “How to ask a question” Please, check it

PowerShell to select a certificate and encrypt a password

2011-09-01T15:00:00.001-07:00

Here is a quick little script to encrypt a password with PowerShell. Yes, it requires the user to select a certificate and enter the password but that could be easy to change.. I have found this very handy when encrypting passwords for use in Azure Role settings, such as Azure Connect. Secure String does not work as in Azure my local machine keys are not available, however I can use a

Duplicating an IIS application in Azure with PowerShell

2011-08-25T11:11:00.001-07:00

I have a need to add an additional application pool into IIS in my Azure Web Role. The requirements from the developer are: I copy an existing application folder under IIS to a new folder. I turn this copy of the folder into an application. I add this application to the same application pool of the application I am copying. I knew what I needed to do. It can be done straight

NetJoinDomain failed with error code 8557

2011-08-23T10:17:00.001-07:00

This was an interesting little one that happened in my Azure Service while using Azure Connect to join my Role instances to my on-premise domain controller. Let me lay out the scenario.. Trying to apply some best practice to my environment I an using a regular domain user account in my Role configuration for Azure Connect (why would you ever embed a domain administrator account in a static

Importing a Certificate Revocation List with PowerShell

2011-08-19T15:08:00.001-07:00

This was an interesting one and a follow-up to my post about importing a Certificate (.cer) with PowerShell. I now ran into the situation where I have an application that is highly enforcing certificate use by using the .Net libraries. The disconnect came into play because the application was testing the Certificate Revocation List of the certificate that I provided with my private Certificate

Getting remote PowerShell output back to your local machine

2011-08-17T10:35:00.001-07:00

PowerShell remoting has been around for some time now but I have not had a reason to use it. I finally found one, I needed some information from within a file on a remote system. This is where WMI let me down. It could give me information about the file(s) I needed, but I needed to read and parse the content of the file and I further needed to process that at the client machine that was

Using PowerShell to write and execute CMD and BAT

2011-07-28T09:33:00.001-07:00

Here is the important part, right up front: remember your encoding when using Out-File. There, done. No, seriously – this is one of those silly things that I just spent a while figuring out. I have a PowerShell script and it is querying for variables for me. I have an executable that I need to run and it will not call properly using PowerShell. The answer; write your commands to a CMD file

Hyper-V appears to run out of RAM when there is plenty

2011-07-20T16:23:00.001-07:00

Here is one issue that I have been tipping folks off to in the forum for some time. The scenario is: I have an environment, it is running great, totally stable. At some point try to do something and I am told there are not enough resources. If I start to look at memory counters it appears that the management OS of the Hyper-V Server is running out of RAM. The other thing – if you do all the

Granting Network Service permissions to a Certificates Private key

2011-07-18T13:37:00.001-07:00

There are many many reasons why you want your applications to run under the more restricted Network Service instead of the higher Local System. The problem that you run in to is when certificates are involved. A Local Machine Certificate is generally available to processes running as Local System by default. In my case I have Azure injecting the certificate into the role for me and I have a

FirstLogonCommands to configure your images on deployment when user context is required

2011-07-14T14:22:00.001-07:00

This is an old trick and I am sure that there are more elegant ways to handle this. However, I thought I would share how I am using AutoAdminLogon and FirstLogonCommands in my sysprep unattend answer file to do some heavy lifting for me to drive modifying server settings and application install and configuration. This came about through using an Azure VM role and being forced to complete as

Using the Azure Fabric to add certificates to your VM Role

2011-07-13T16:13:00.001-07:00

A really useful feature of Azure is that it can inject elements into the Role instances as it applies the configuration. This is super, extra useful because all roles are sysprep’d images. This includes your VM Roles. If you follow the Azure rules for creating your VM Roles you must prepare the VHD image with sysprep. I don’t think this is very important if you only have one instance – but

Adding a Certificate to the Trusted Root CA Store using PowerShell

2011-07-06T11:02:00.001-07:00

Here is a little reminder for myself. My scenario is that I am adding a simple public certificate to a Local Computer certificate store. And I need to script it with PowerShell. I have actually been searching around for this one for a bit and all the results I find make it seem really really complex and complicated and it isn’t. But there are some gotchas that need to be dealt with. Here is

role discovery data is unavailable with Worker Role front end

2011-07-05T13:31:00.001-07:00

When working with the current state of the Azure platform the only thing that I can say is that creativity is king and assumptions are many. I have spent more time working around default behavior than I like to mention. And, mind you, I am working with a lot of ‘beta’ features. I recently ran into a problem with a script that I found simply baffling. seems it is just a blocked / hidden

Using PowerShell to modify Apache httpd.conf files

2011-06-30T14:18:00.001-07:00

Now, you might think this is easy and straightforward. But when you touch an httpd.conf file with PowerShell – manipulate the contents of the file a bit and then write it back. Then turn around and start the Apache service and all you get back is “invalid function” – this simple solution becomes a major achievement. The root to this whole issue I found described in a powershellcommunity.org

Replacing a backslash with a foreslash in PowerShell

2011-06-28T10:32:00.001-07:00

Using the title Replacing “\” with “/” is not very search friendly so we talk of fore- and back- slashes instead. This is an interesting a quick exercise in RegEx (I had no idea I was getting tangled up in this) syntax. Lets begin with a path: $myPath = (${env:ProgramFiles(x86)} + "\MyStuff") This returns: C:\Program Files (x86)\MyStuff Now, I have an Apache config file, so I need to turn

Secure Gateway SSL handshake from client failed with IE9

2011-06-24T08:10:00.001-07:00

I recently ran into an issue with Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and Citrix Secure Gateway. Using two Windows 7 machines (one with IE9 one with IE8) it was quick to realize that this was an IE9 specific issue. What I discovered was that I could logon, I would get my list of applications, but when I launched my application from the WebInterface the application never launched. Interestingly, the

Logging Azure startup tasks

2011-05-09T10:17:00.001-07:00

This is one of the old DOS batch file tricks. Really simple, really useful, and still works after 20+ years. When you need to send the output of a script to a file: >> pathToMyLog\Mylog.log IN the case of Azure startup tasks and you want a quick way to see what happened, what is happening simply define this in the startup task.

FreeNAS as a storage target for simple testing

2010-01-07T13:41:00.001-08:00

Working with various hypervisors I frequently have a need for various types of storage volumes. We can always use local storage for testing, but how do you handle a cluster of Hyper-V Server or a Pool of XenServer hosts? I have used a variety of services. Right now in the lab I am running Windows Storage Server 2008 to present NFS volumes and StarWind to present iSCSI volumes (I found StarWind

VHD CSV CORE and RDS article updates

2010-01-05T14:11:00.000-08:00

Every now and then the individual teams at MSFT put out some really useful blog articles. What are VHDs? http://blogs.technet.com/windows_vpc/archive/2009/11/24/virtual-hard-disks-vhds-in-windows-virtual-pc.aspx Creating a Virtual Machine to be stored on a Cluster Shared Volume http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2009/11/30/

IT needs a language

2010-01-01T11:07:00.000-08:00

I constantly struggle with writing documentation and also communicating concepts to many IT folks in writing. This is one of the reasons that has driven me to producing videos and capture sessions over the past couple years (I can say far more, more accurately with combined speech and visuals than attempt to accurately convey in writing). My work as a moderator of the Hyper-V TechNet forum

Hypervisor virtualization basics a visual representation

2009-12-22T10:29:00.001-08:00

For all of you that want a place to point folks to describe the basics of virtualization, I have put together a few videos to describe the hypervisor, CPU, and network concepts in a visual way. The intent is to give a quick amount of conceptual information to those folks that suddenly are dealing with VMs, but might not have the experience to fully understand what they are looking at.

Datamation puts their angle on the big three virtualization vendors

2009-12-17T07:59:00.001-08:00

Datamation has put their spin and opinion into the world of virtualization and the virtualization engines and offerings in this comparison of Citrix (XenServer), Microsoft (Hyper-V, SCVMM), and VMware (ESX, vCenter). Mind you, this is a judgment article – But it mentions Kensho – a project very near to my personal efforts, and DocFinder – another product I was involved in the infancy of. You

Remote Desktop Simulation Tools

2009-10-16T07:55:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has recently released a very interesting tool, that can be useful in scoping the performance and capacity of a Remote Desktop deployment. It is all Server 2008 and above based – Hyper-V of course and I am sure it is RDS centric, however I wonder how creative I can be in applying its capabilities to other scenarios or hosting systems. As I can see this being very useful in making

Importing Kensho OVF to ESX

2009-10-09T09:05:00.001-07:00

My main focus has been in taking OVF content from other vendors and consuming that with Citrix Kensho (the OVF Tool or XenConvert 2.x) – however lets turn the tables. OVF is a format that describes virtual appliances; these could be single or multiple machine. In doing so, OVF describes the virtual hardware and physical requirements of each machine. In the spirit of supporting the development of

Enabling Citrix Merchandising Server paravirtualized vm to run on Hyper-V

2009-09-24T14:23:00.001-07:00

Be warned, Citrix Support will not support your Merchandising Server if you follow these steps.Here is my scenario:I have a fully paravirtualized Linux virtual machine (Merchandising Server) that is made to run on a xen hypervisor (the family of hypervisors that enable Linux VMs to boot kernel-xen and run in a truly paravirtualized and highly efficient way). I want to move that vm over to

HyperV networking works on Server 2008 R2 guest but not Server 2008 guest

2009-09-17T08:07:00.001-07:00

The Scenario: Hyper-V R2 (Server 2008 R2) host, Server 2008 guest (not R2), Server 2008 R2 guest The situation plays out like this: I create a VM and install Server 2008 R2 Standard. The external network, connecting me to the internet, works fine and the guest OS automatically has a working network device and connection. I shut down this VM and leave it off. I then create another VM,

Importing VMware Studio with Citrix OVF Tool to Hyper-V

2009-09-15T15:46:00.001-07:00

This is something that I just had to try. I imported the VMware Studio 2 Beta virtual appliance to a Hyper-V R2 host using Citrix OVF Tool. Quite fun actually, and pretty easy. Yes, I did a video, just to prove it. http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/1070 First, the preparation: Begin by creating a Network Share for your OVF Library. Create a folder under that for the VMware Studio appliance

Another boot from VHD article

2009-09-14T14:57:00.001-07:00

I have seen lots of instructions about booting from a VHD. A new Windows 7 feature (actually a feature of the new Windows bootloader that is part of Win 7 and Server 2008 R2). This is a component of the native VHD support that is part of the latest release. Anyway, on MSDN of all places I stumble upon some nicely written, easy to follow instructions of how to do this. (I find it when I am not

KMS Client Setup Keys

2009-08-26T12:22:00.001-07:00

I always have the hardest time searching for this each time I need it again. Vista and above (Vista, Server 2008 and higher) have this wonderful KMS licensing system. That is all fine and dandy. During installation and creation of virtual machines, I frequently run into situations where I must provide a product key either during installation or for the sysprep process to allow mini-setup to

The basics of VDI

2009-08-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

VDI is a term that is thrown around a lot lately and in many ways.the acronym stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.In its most basic description, this simply means that the operating system runs in a location that is separate from the end use the is interacting with the operating system (and using applications that are running within it).This is only one form of virtualization, which is also

Importing the virtual machine succeeded but with the following warning.

2009-08-21T13:28:00.001-07:00

When importing a virtual machine to Hyper-V R2 you might see the following error dialog: Importing the virtual machine succeeded but with the following warning. Import completed with warnings. I have seen this error quite a bit, and I must say that it is no reason for panic. Your VM is safe. If you open the error and read the

Project Kensho Demonstration Videos

2009-08-20T14:35:00.001-07:00

Here are the instructional videos for Project Kensho. 1. http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/956 Installing the OVF Tool 2. http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/963 Installing the XenServer-CIM 3. http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/965 Using the OVF Tool (the Basics) 4. http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/970 Using the OVF Tool (Advanced) 5. http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/971 Using the OVF