Tech Ed 2008 - Demo 1 - Administering Windows

benp — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:33:00 GMT

Hello Again

Well I’ve delivered my session “Windows, PowerShell and WMI: Unveiling Microsoft’s Best Kept Secret”, and as promised here are the scripts for the Demo’s I used during my session:

Demo 1 – Administering Windows

All these demos are simple command lines that I just typed straight in PowerShell, no need for any fancy scripts.

Basics

The following lines of code show help on how to use the Get-WMIObject cmdlet in PowerShell, how to list all classes in the cimv2 namespace and finally how to use some basic parameters.

Get-Help -name Get-WMIObject

Get-Help -name Get-WMIObject –det

get-wmiobject -namespace "root\cimv2" –list

Gwmi -namespace "root\cimv2" –list

Gwmi -namespace "root\cimv2" -class Win32_LogicalDisk

Gwmi -class Win32_LogicalDisk

Gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk

Gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk –computername localhost

$cred = get-credentials

Gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk –credential $cred

Disks

These lines of code show how to get disk information from a system, identify all the properties and methods of the disk objects that can be used, then uses some properties.

Gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk | Get-Member

$disks = gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk –computername localhost

$disks[0].freespace

$disks[0].freespace/1gb

$disks[0].filesystem

Hotfixes

These lines connect to a system and list all the Hotfixes that have been installed.

$hotfixes = gwmi Win32_QuickFixEngineering –computername localhost

$hotfixes | get-member

$hotfixes | format-table Hotfixid

OperatingSystem

These lines enumerate basic operating system information: the OS version, service pack level and OS architecture type.

$os = gwmi win32_OperatingSystem -computername Serverxxx

$os | get-member

$os | format-list caption, CSDVersion,OSArchitecture

Network Adapter

The following lines modify the IP Address and Subnet Mask of a network adapter using the EnableStatic method.

$nics = Gwmi win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration

$nic = $nics | where{$_.description –like “*XXXXXXXXXXXX*”}

$IPAddress = x.x.x.x

$subnetmask = x.x.x.x

$nic.EnableStatic($IPAddress, $SubnetMask)

Well that’s the first demo stay tuned for Demo 2 – Administering Servers in Bulk.

Enjoy!

BenP

Clustering Best Practices: Using PowerShell to Check Hotfix Compliance

benp — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:40:00 GMT

So Guys + Gals

As well as writing PowerShell scripts and running a PowerShell course here in the UK, I spend a lot of time looking at clusters. I go to customers and run a cluster health check to make sure that their cluster adheres to best practices. Lots of what I do involves manual checking of various values, so I thought I would write some PowerShell scripts to automate some of this checking.

So for the next few posts I am going to post some scripts to check that certain aspects of a high availability cluster adhere to best practice.

My friend and colleague Richard Macdonald is doing exactly the same thing but in VBScript (boo ... hisss). Check out his similar version(s), but in VBScript.

http://blogs.technet.com/richard_macdonald/archive/2007/05/03/879029.aspx

Checking Hotfix Compliance

What does this script do? It checks whether the recommended hotfixes that should be installed on a cluster are installed on each node. With high availability systems it’s crucial that all nodes are patched consistently, and they are patched with the latest fixes.

Check out the following KB’s for a list of fixes for each Operating System and Service Pack level.

Windows 2000 – Service Pack 4

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895090

Windows 2003 -RTM

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895092/

Windows 2003 – Service Pack 1

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923830/

Windows 2003 – Service Pack 2

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935640/

How to use this script

Firstly, download the script. It is attached to this blog in a zip file.

This script takes the cluster name, and text file with listed fixes as arguments. E.g.

.\Check-ClusHotfix.ps1 MyCluster Fixes-Win2k3-SP1.txt

This will create some output on the screen, and a tab delimited file which can be manipulated easily in Excel if needed. It tells you exactly what fix is installed on each node. You do not need to run this script on the cluster, just on a workstation which has RPC access to the cluster nodes.

How this script works

It reads in a txt file with a list of fixes, then queries each node in the cluster to ascertain if the fix is installed. It writes the output to screen and creates a csv file with the output.

In order to get this working I have used the Cluster WMI provider. More details on the cluster WMI provider can be found here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372876.aspx

I won’t explain the whole script, however these are some the key parts that are worth looking at in detail.

$AllNodes = Get-WmiObject -class MSCluster_Node -namespace "root\mscluster" -computername $ClusterName

This returns a collection of cluster nodes. In order to make sure we connect to each node in the cluster, we can use a foreach loop.

foreach ($Node in $AllNodes)

Then with each node we can use the WMI class Win32_QuickFixEngineering to get the installed fixes.

$InstalledFixes = Get-WmiObject -class "Win32_QuickFixEngineering" -namespace "root\CIMV2" -computername $Node.Name

All we then do is loop through each hotfix from the text file and run the following command. $Checklist is created by using get-content and is an array of text lines. This is the collection that we loop through

$FixInstalled = $InstalledFixes | where-object {$_.HotfixID -like '*' + $checklist[$i] + '*'}

We then just write out results to a 2 dimensional array which mimics a table, which we can output at the end.

The actual code that does the useful stuff is very small, the rest of it is basic error checking and formatting the output. Attached is a zip file with the script and some text files for checking various systems.

Please, please make sure you test this in a non-production environment before you run it against your production cluster. Never run anything on a cluster unless you are 110% confident that it is fine to do so.

If you have any questions or feedback, just give me a shout.

That is all.

BenP

Benp's Guide to Stuff : hotfix

Tech Ed 2008 - Demo 1 - Administering Windows

Clustering Best Practices: Using PowerShell to Check Hotfix Compliance