Helpful PowerShell One-Liners

clinth@microsoft.com — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:16:27 GMT

While doing a BizTalk Health check this week, the customer and I thought it would be cool to try to do as much as possible in an interactive PowerShell session to collect the data we needed. We created a lot of PowerShell one-liners and I thought I’d share it. These one-liners use WMI, so nearly all of them can be ran from a remote workstation, so this means that PowerShell is not needed on the remote BizTalk servers unless otherwise noted.

Be careful of word wrap in this email. All of these commands are *one-liners* – meaning they all go on one line ;-).

# List of BizTalk Servers. This is needed, so that the rest of the commands will execute on each of them per command.

$BizTalkServers = "BizTalkServer1","BizTalkServer2"

# Ping servers (latency check)

$BizTalkServers | foreach-object {"================";$_;"================";ping $_}

# Pathping (packet loss check)

$BizTalkServers | foreach-object {"================";$_;"================";pathping $_}

# Get Total Physical Memory

$BizTalkServers | ForEach-Object {"================";$_;"================";Get-wmiobject -Query "SELECT TotalPhysicalMemory FROM Win32_ComputerSystem" -ComputerName $_} | Format-List TotalPhysicalMemory

# Installed hotfixes (quick)

$BizTalkServers | ForEach-Object {"================";$_;"================";Get-wmiobject -Query "SELECT HotFixID,ServicePackInEffect FROM Win32_QuickFixEngineering" -ComputerName $_} | Format-list HotfixID, ServicePackInEffect

# NumberOfProcessors

$BizTalkServers | ForEach-Object {"================";$_;"================";Get-wmiobject -Query "SELECT NumberOfProcessors FROM Win32_ComputerSystem" -ComputerName $_} | Format-List NumberOfProcessors

# System Information

$BizTalkServers | ForEach-Object {"================";$_;"================";Get-wmiobject -Query "SELECT Caption, CSDVersion, MaxProcessMemorySize, PAEEnabled, ServicePackMajorVersion FROM Win32_OperatingSystem" -ComputerName $_} | Format-List Caption, ServicePackMajorVersion, CSDVersion, MaxProcessMemorySize, PAEEnabled

# Clock Synchronization Check

$BizTalkServers | ForEach-Object {"================";$_;"================";Get-wmiobject -Query "SELECT * FROM Win32_LocalTime" -ComputerName $_} | format-list Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute, Second

# BizTalk Host Instance information (WMIC) (Must be ran locally) (WMIC is native to the operating system)

wmic /NAMESPACE:"\\root\MicrosoftBizTalkServer" PATH MSBTS_HostInstance GET HostName, HostType, Logon, NTGroupName, RunningServer

# BizTalk Host Instance information (PowerShell) (Must be ran locally) (PowerShell must be installed)

$BizTalkServers | ForEach-Object {"================";$_;"================";Get-wmiobject -Namespace "root\MicrosoftBizTalkServer" -Query "SELECT * FROM MSBTS_Host" -ComputerName $_} | Format-List HostName, HostType, Logon, NTGroupName, RunningServer

BizTalk Admin Console Fails with DTC Failures

clinth@microsoft.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:56:40 GMT

Relevant Environment Information:

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (32-bit)

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit)

Symptoms: While doing a BizTalk Health Check with a customer, we encountered errors with the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) while using the BizTalk 2006 R2 Admin Console. I, unfortunately don’t have the exact error any longer, but it mentioned something about unable to contact the DTC service which is a very serious issue because BizTalk is heavily reliant on the DTC service. The odd thing is that the BizTalk services continued to operate normally, so only the admin console was effected by this.

Looking at the event logs, I found a few errors similar to this one:

Category: ENTSSO
Type: Warning
Source: Enterprise Single Sign-On
Event ID: 10532
Description: "Failed to retrieve master secrets. Verify that the master secret server name is correct and that it is available.
Secret Server Name: <Computer>
Error Code: 0x800706BF, The remote procedure call failed and did not execute."

This error is also a very scary error to get because just like the DTC service, BizTalk is heavily reliant on the Enterprise Single Sign-On service (ENTSSO).

We called up Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) to help us with this. Yes, I am a Microsoft field support professional, but I don’t know everything. ;-)

CSS had us restart the DTC service on the BizTalk Servers, then restart the Microsoft ENTSSO Master Secret Server. After that, it was working again. No errors in the BizTalk Admin Console.

Cause: The DTC service was restarted and the ENTSSO Master Secret service lost contact with it.

Solution: Restart the DTC service, the restart the ENTSSO Master Secret Service.

Lesson Learned: Always restart the ENTSSO Master Secret Service after restarting the DTC service.

More Information: The Enterprise SSO Master Secret key is extremely important. If your ENTSSO service becomes corrupted, then you lose everything. There are certainly *many* more reasons why the ENTSSO Master Secret Service may fail, so always make sure you backup the Master Secret key using SSOManage.exe, backup the key to some place you can get to and where it is not on the local machine, and finally, ensure you remember the restore password.

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Clint Huffman's Windows Performance Blog : BizTalk

Helpful PowerShell One-Liners

BizTalk Admin Console Fails with DTC Failures