tango alpha delta posted:

I love Powershell and I'm here to tell you why:

We have a team of 1000 developers who regularly release a new version of their vertical. It's huge. We are a SOX shop, so one of the controls is that the developers cannot branch their own code. We do the branching.

They send us an Excel spreadsheet with all the versions they need branched.

I wrote a Powershell script to extract the versions and convert them into SVN branch commands. My script also updates the Excel spreadsheet with the new branch numbers. The best part is that this is all automated. We create a change request and roll out the branches into production without any problems.

EDIT: To accomplish the same thing in C# is loving painful and not worth the effort.

tango alpha delta posted:

I love Powershell and I'm here to tell you why:

We have a team of 1000 developers who regularly release a new version of their vertical. It's huge. We are a SOX shop, so one of the controls is that the developers cannot branch their own code. We do the branching.

They send us an Excel spreadsheet with all the versions they need branched.

I wrote a Powershell script to extract the versions and convert them into SVN branch commands. My script also updates the Excel spreadsheet with the new branch numbers. The best part is that this is all automated. We create a change request and roll out the branches into production without any problems.

EDIT: To accomplish the same thing in C# is loving painful and not worth the effort.

TheEffect posted:

I'm trying to create a PowerShell script that will send a Lync message to all users in column "A" the text in columns "B" and "C".

I started out using this guide- http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/archive/2011/05/05/sendim.aspx

I believe I have most of the framework down, but my main issue is figuring out how to actually IM the user. When I run my script I get

"Cannot find an overload for "AddParticipant" and the argument count: "1"."

Here's what I have so far (the million try statements were to help troubleshoot).

e; updated broken code.

capitalpunctuation posted:

Can't see anything in event viewer to clue me in to what's going on. All the googling says remotely executing msi files, or batch files, is trivially easy, but I've followed a hundred tutorials to no avail. What am I missing?

quote:

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around why this works, but I think it's because:

1. $jdoe1_groups contains an array and thus requires ForEach-Item for iterative processing
2. Add-ADGroupMember -Identity parameter requiring Get-ADGroup to produce the appropriate object type

Hoping someone can help further clarify what's going on here if I'm not on the right track.

Reiz posted:

You basically figured it out. Sort of. $jdoe1_groups probably doesn't "technically" contain an array, but it does need to be iterated through. Your script is a little messy looking to me (not that it matters, though) and could probably be cleaned up with some dot sourcing. I can't really tell without testing, and I don't have an AD environment at home, but to me it looks like:

code:

$jdoe1_groups | ForEach-Item {Add-ADGroupMember -Identity (Get-ADGroup $jdoe1_groups) -Members jdoe2}

Is double-iterating on you. At a glance, what appears to be happening is that it takes each item of jdoe1_groups and does an add-adgroupmember -identity (all of the groups in jdoe1_groups) -members jdoe2.

This might not be the case with ForEach-Item (I almost always use ForEach-Object), but generally I've found that you can force iteration by doing "$Variable | ForEach-Whatever {do thing}", or if the commands "play nice", you can do a "Do-Thing -Identity(Get-Thing)", and it will iterate through that way. You should enable debug mode (select a line in the ISE, make sure the script is saved to disk, hit F9) and step through the script a few times to make sure it isn't double-iterating on you.

I've also found that generally $variable = get-object | select SomeProperty doesn't behave the way you think it does. $Variable probably still refers to the object returned by Get-Object, not the properties returned by Select-Object. So, you most likely specifically Select-Objected into GM and got ADGroup, when in actuality the $variable was still referring to the parent object that contains a child object that is an AD group. That probably explains your Object -> ADGroup conversion error. Try piping into get-member without doing the Select-Object and see if it still returns an ADGroup.

TheEffect posted:

Got a bit further with this. Apparently "AddParticipant" does not want a string but a URI. So I changed my code to convert via

$contact = $LyncClient.ContactManager.GetContactByUri("yourperson@domain.com")
$Convo.AddParticipant($contact)

however now I'm getting "Exception calling "GetContactByUri" with "1" argument(s): "Value does not fall within the expected range."

CLAM DOWN posted:

Two ways to do that as I know:

code:

Get-EventLog -LogName Application | where source -eq "VSS"

But that cmdlet is pretty limited. You can also use:

code:

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{logname='Application';providername='VSS';starttime="1/8/14";endtime="7/8/14"} | Out-File C:\Temp\output.txt

This will give you all VSS events in the application event log from 1 Aug to 7 Aug and output it to C:\Temp\output.txt.

Does that help at all?

ConfusedUs posted:

That's about 10x easier than I expected. Is it possible to grab any event that includes a word in the description?

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

I'm away from my desk but I would start with get-help new-ScheduledTask -full

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

I'm away from my desk but I would start with get-help new-ScheduledTask -full

I'll test it out in a bit and see if I can get something to work.

How are you going to be getting the times? Can you make a csv with the VM and time?

Ithaqua posted:

I think those were added in windows 8.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

poo poo. I hate when that happens.
Maybe it can be done with .NET

I still want to make it work. This is a fun challenge.

Hughmoris posted:

I'll have to do it without installing any further software.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

.Net is a prerequisite for powershell so that won't be a problem.

I think you might start with this:
http://letitknow.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/create-scheduled-task-by-using-powershell/

The key element is
$service = NewObject -ComObject("Schedule.Service")

You can then use
$Service | Get-Member
To find new properties.

This is pretty difficult territory for me so I'd just carefully look at the examples and try to work it out.

Hughmoris posted:

At first glance it looks like the site you listed could be a more elegant solution but I'm not too familiar with a lot of the code being used. So, I went about solving it like a caveman.

1. At my workstation, I create a local task in command-prompt:

2. Now that the task is created for my local machine, I export it to a XML file:

3. I edit that XML file in notepad to have a launch time of 23:00:05, then save

4. I then export that newly adjusted task file to each VM:



With this clumsy method, I'd have to do step 3 and 4 for each machine because I'd have to edit the XML file each time to increase the launch time by 5 seconds. However, that should be MUCH faster than going the the TaskScheduler GUI for each machine.


I tested it on 2 machines and it appears to work. Ugly but effective. I'm definitely ears for other solutions though.

ConfusedUs posted:

I've created a number of scripts to generate randomized data and files to test backups.

I'm happy with all of them except my MSSQL script. For that one, I have a .sql file that I call with powershell. It works well enough, but is there a way to talk to MSSQL and insert data into a table from powershell itself?

Ithaqua posted:

I've taken a similar approach (the COM stuff sucks). But why not use PowerShell to set the time in the XML instead of manually editing it?

This should work:

code:

$timeOffset = 0;
$machines = @("machine1", "machine2", "etc")
$xml = [xml](get-content adjusted_test_task.xml)

$initialTime = [DateTime]::Parse($xml.Task.Triggers.TimeTrigger.StartBoundary)

foreach ($machine in $machines) {
    $outputFile = $machine + "_adjusted_test_task.xml"
    $timeOffset += 5;
    $newTime = $initialTIme.AddSeconds($timeOffset);
    $xml.Task.Triggers.TimeTrigger.StartBoundary = $newTime.ToString("s")
    set-content $outputFile $xml.InnerXml
    schtasks /create /s $machine /u hughmoris /p password /XML $outputFile /tn test_task
}

Hughmoris posted:

Thanks for taking the time to do this. I don't know powershell but I think I can piece together whats happening. I'm going to try it out later tonight and I'll let you know how it works out.

Hughmoris posted:

Just to follow up, I attempted to create this PS script. I was unable to run the script due to being restricted by the system. After a little reading, I tried to allow it with: set-executionpolicy remotesigned. Received the error that I couldn't alter the regkey. So, there goes that. Not sure if our IT department will unlocked that for me. Either way, the higher ups want to start all this crap at 0830 Monday morning so it won't do me much good.

I do have AutoIt installed on this workstation, so I guess I'll try and figure out how to write your script in AutoIt. Unless it would be easier to write some sort of command-prompt script.

Scaramouche posted:

I don't get anything, the file doesn't even get created. The output of the script above is using Write-Host, which >> should be hijacking based on everything I read. e.g., the summary output:

code:

write-host "Number of Files checked: $($files.count)."
write-host "Number of duplicate files: $m."
Write-host "$($hashfiles) files hashed."
Write-Host "$($hashsize) bytes hashed."
write-host "$dupebytes duplicates bytes."

What am I missing?

Scaramouche posted:

CLAM DOWN posted:

Do you have the option of using the 7zip command line utility? I think it works way better and is way easier, I also recall some restrictions with using the built-in method like you are, like it doesn't work on zip files with subfolders, etc.

Spazz posted:

Any suggestions on a book for someone who has PS experience but wants to round out their knowledge? I've been writing scripts for about 9~ months now, with past Python experience, but I know I'm missing some stuff.

I was looking at Windows PowerShell Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Scripting Microsoft's Command Shell, but I'm open to other suggestions. Work is reimbursing me so cost isn't an issue as long as it isn't ridiculous.