Consistency Check

One of our customers contacted me to get some help with requesting certificates for his brand new Exchange 2007 set-up. He recently ordered some certificates for a citrix deployment and was trying to apply the same processus to his messaging infrastructure.

I immediately directed him to Digicert’s Exchange 2007 CSR Command Wizard which I remembered from this excellent blog post Sembee, to assist him with the creation of the appropriate Exchange Management Shell Command.

I just discovered a new toy: the Google Shell. You can actually think of it as web based command line front end for most of the popular Google Tools.

Some examples for you to try:

• guest@goosh.org:/web> help
• guest@goosh.org:/web> place brussels
• guest@goosh.org:/web> translate en nl who needs powershell anyway
• guest@goosh.org:/web> read blog.koenvermoesen.be

The result on that last one actually looks like this:

Enjoy!

Just integrated the domain I still had from my old mtb blog. Please update your bookmarks and feed readers!

I actually missed the latest release of TiddlyWiki 2.4.0. It’s my favorite solution for building a portable knowledge base without the need to install any server side software.

The release consists mainly of bug fixes. It still doesn’t seem to work correctly over a UNC-path however, with our version of Internet Explorer. Very inconvenient, as not every colleague has the same drive mappings…

The release notes can be found here. The page doesn’t provide an RSS/Atom feed of it’s own however. So I was relying on a 3rd party service to generate one for me. Unfortunately I was still subscribed to an old, inexisting URL…

Time to set up some redundancy:

• http://feed43.com/tiddlywikirevisionhistory.xml
  
• http://page2rss.com/rss/b79eea02edfa212e717dfa62edb98721

Feed43 analyzes the html-structure of a page to try and catch new headlines. Page2rss on the other hand monitors a web page and provides a feed for the changes.

I’m using PsTools a lot for the moment. These nifty command line tools prove very efficient for remotely administering a bunch of servers (e.g. checking the state of a service or restarting it).

One of the drawbacks however is that the different versions of these tools don’t always seem to cooperate very well. A lengthy and time consuming solution is to use Hyena to remove the psexesvc service.

The little script below relies on SC to get that done a lot quicker. It basically checks if the psexesvc service exists and kills it if it does.

@echo off
cls

:: Checking & removing psexec from the remote host
For /F “Tokens=2″ %%I in (’sc \\%1 query psexesvc ^| find “SERVICE_NAME”‘) Do Set StrPsexecExists=%%I
If /I “[%StrPsexecExists%]“==”[psexesvc]” (echo PsExec running on the remote host; killing it. & sc \\%1 stop psexesvc & sc \\%1 delete psexesvc) else (echo PsExec is not running on the remote host.)

The script accepts 1 input parameter; the computer name.

Apart from using the caret (”^”) to escape the pipe (”|”) there’s nothing special about it. I’m mainly blogging about it because it’s called in some other script I’d like to write about later on.

I’ve been working on a PowerShell auto-completion file for my favorite lightweight text-editor (Notepad++) as I couldn’t find one online: powershellapi

You need to rename the file to powershell.api yourselves as WordPress.com limits the file extensions that can be uploaded.

Procedure:

1. Install the PowerShell Language Definitions for Notepad++ (for syntax highlighting) and make sure it’s working (this is a prerequisite).
2. Save the the file above in “…\Notepad++\plugins\APIs”
3. Rename it to powershell.api.
4. Make sure the language is set to powershell in your document.

Note: You might want to have a look at the Notepad++ Auto-completion HOWTO for more details about this feature.

The auto-complete features of npp are not the most powerful though. It seems to work perfectly if you hit CTRL+SPACE before the dash. If you try after the dash it seems to forget about the verb in a PS-cmdlet. Even the builtin languages like LISP sport the same behaviour. The underscore characters in the WMI-class names and the “about” pages do not pose a problem.

I spend a lot of time in Google Reader trying to keep on top of technology. After trying a couple of desktop based RSS-readers (GreatNews & Liferea) I switched to a web-based solution. Man, I LOVE flex-offices!

I’m not really into Web 2.0 hype but in this case I actually find the community features really useful…

For my current job, for example, I’m working on a “knowledge hub” for Microsoft Exchange. I’m not supposed to know everything myself, but the more the better obviously. Hence I subscribed to about 37 blogs covering the matter.

While I’m enjoying my time in Reader I’m tagging the interesting entries in these feeds with a specific tag. This also allows me to do some deduplication, as there’s really no benefit in having 10 “SP1 is out!”-entries. This tag is shared and the RSS feed for it is incorporated in my personal Sharepoint site, the MS Exchange specific Sharepoint site and this blog (see bottom right). Efficiency!

I’m using a similar system to share items with both my brother an my girlfriend. Both of them have their own tag and both of them subscribed to the corresponding feed in their reader account. That way I’m able to provide both of them with high quality shared items whereas the normal “share” feature would give them 50% noise.

The old Lotus Notes client at my current assignment doesn’t seem to like UNC-paths. If I want to make sure links are clickable I need to convert the path to a URL.

I originally used a excel workbook for it, but that’s obviously overkill. Enter the script below:

@echo off
cls
set url=%*
set url=%url:\\=file://%
set url=%url:\=/%
echo %url% | clip
echo URL has been converted and copied to your clipboard!
set url=

I simply launch it from the command prompt and pass the UNC path to it. The script returns the corresponding URL to my clipboard for easy pasting!

After having received a splendid presentation on powershell from a couple of my colleagues (Rastix, Virtix and others…) it was time to write my first script myselves. After fiddling around a couple of hours I came up with a script to list a top 10 of memory consuming processes on a remote computer:

function PrintMegs
{
[Math]::Truncate($args[0]/1MB)
}

get-wmiobject -class win32_process -computername $args[0] | Sort-Object vm -desc | Select-Object -first 10 | Format-Table ProcessName,@{Label=”VM (MB)”;Expression={PrintMegs($_.VM)}},@{Label=”WS (MB)”;Expression={PrintMegs($_.WS)}},Handles,ProcessID,Path -autosize

The script takes one input parameter; the name of the computer, it does work with “localhost” also though.

The hardest part was figuring out how to print the memroy details in MB, with no decimal places and in table format ;-)