blindpete.com Just my rambles

Source: How to Geek

Facebook definitely allows you to easily communicate with others, but if you’re not careful, certain information you would like to remain private can be exposed. Here we take a look at locking down your profile, and how to avoid other annoyances.

Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with friends, family and other contacts online. It’s also a great place to spread personal information, pictures, and other data to everyone if you don’t use the proper settings. The first thing you want to do is change default settings under the Privacy Settings.

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Well, I’m finally starting to recover from the “anti-coding” feelings I get while on vacation, and that means that I’m not only starting to think about writing code all the time, but I’m also back to writing about it on Twitter, FriendFeed and even Facebook … oh, and here!

So last night (in time for his appearance on the PowerScripting Podcast), James Brundage announced the release of the PowerShellPack which is an open source part of the Resource Kit for Windows 7.

The good news is that there is an astonishing amount of really useful stuff in this pack, and it’s all released under the open source Ms-PL license (the documentation is released under the Creative Commons‘ Attribution License).

I won’t repeat here the information that’s available on the PowerShellPack page, since you can go and read it there … but the standout stuff in my opinion are the functions around code generation, .net and COM ... as well as the scheduled tasks stuff. I’ve also heard the ISE Pack portion is very good as well (but honestly I don’t use the ISE myself). As a side note: James said last night that you shouldn’t even try running this stuff in PowerShell 1, and of course some of it is Windows 7 or Vista specific, like the Task Scheduler scripts…

Of course, the really obvious thing that I should be commenting on is WPK, which is essentially an alternative implementation of what I’ve done in PowerBoots! I’m still a little frustrated about that, as I offered to work with them, and they’ve released their code under the same Ms-PL license and everything … but they couldn’t accept my help/code just because I don’t work at Microsoft. I’m going to try to avoid going on a rant here, but it has to be said that someone high up at Microsoft really needs to start pushing the freedom to adopt outside code (like they did with JQuery) so that they no longer have to duplicate other people’s efforts. Ah well.

In any case, to be fair: it’s not that they “ripped off” my idea. A TCL-like environment for PowerShell is something that Jeffrey Snover had talked about a long time ago, and he actually shared some code with me that heavily influenced the way PowerBoots turned out…

The really good news is that since WPK is Ms-PL, I’m happily able to merge it into PowerBoots, and you’ll still get the backwards compatibility with PowerShell 1.0 and other features of PowerBoots, plus some of the great ideas that are in WPK as well. So look for a new PowerBoots release coming soon, and please feel free to ask for features that you think are missing.

As I'm working today will be trying this out and see how I can fit this in the daily Admin life

Now that the App-V client is part of the Windows Server 2008 CAL it seems that Microsoft has released the App-V 4.5 TS client as a free download.

Part of the download process is the registration of your 20 digit Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server Product Identification Key or your Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services Product Identification Key.

Download here.

Note: although the article indicates that Windows Server 2008 R2 is supported this particular download can’t be used on that platform since it’s 64-bit only. App-V 4.6 (currently in development) however will support 64-bit and is planned to be available H1 2010.

October 16th 2009 Posted to App-V News by Ment

About time, not sure if this is the 4.5CU1 will download and check.

Yesterday we had a discussion on running vCenter virtual on one of the internal mailinglists. One of the gaps identified was the lack of a best practices document. Although there are multiple for VI3 and there are some KB articles these do need seem to be easy to find or complete. This is one of the reasons I wrote this article. Keep in mind that these are my recommendations and they do not necessarily align with VMware’s recommendations or requirements.

Sizing

Sizing is one of the most difficult parts in my opinion. As of vSphere the minimum requirements of vCenter have changed but it goes against my personal opinion on this subject. My recommendation would be to always start with 1 vCPU for environments with less than 10 hosts for instance. Here’s my suggestion:

• < 10 ESX Hosts
  • 1 x vCPU
  • 3GB of memory
  • Windows 64Bit OS(preferred) or Windows 32Bit OS
• > 10 ESX Hosts but < 50 ESX Hosts
  • 2 x vCPU
  • 4GB of memory
  • Windows 64Bit OS(preferred) or Windows 32Bit OS
• > 50 ESX hosts but < 200 ESX Hosts
  • 4 x vCPU
  • 4GB of memory
  • Windows 64Bit OS(preferred) or Windows 32Bit OS
• > 200 ESX Hosts
  • 4 x vCPU
  • 8GB of memory
  • Windows 64Bit OS(requirement)

My recommendation differ from VMware’s recommendation. The reason for this is that in small environments(<10 Hosts) there’s usually more flexibility for increasing resources in terms of scheduling down time. Although 2 vCPUs are a requirement I’ve seen multiple installations where a single vCPU was more than sufficient. Another argument for starting with a single vCPU would be “Practice What You Preach”. (How many times have you convinced an application owner to downscale after a P2V?!) I do however personally prefer to always use a 64Bit OS to enable upgrades to configs with more than 4GB of memory when needed.

vCenter Server in a HA/DRS Cluster

1. Disable DRS(Change Automation Level!) for your vCenter Server and make sure to document where the vCenter Server is located (My suggestion would be the first ESX host on the cluster).
2. Make sure HA is enabled for your vCenter Server, and set the startup priority to high. (Default is medium for every VM.)
3. Make sure the vCenter Server VM gets enough resources by setting the shares for both Memory and CPU to “high”.
4. Make sure other services and servers on which vCenter depends are also starting automatically, with a high priority and in the correct order like:
   1. Active Directory.
   2. DNS.
   3. SQL.
5. Write a procedure to boot the vCenter / AD / DNS / SQL manually in case of a complete power outage occurs.

Most of these recommendations are pretty obvious but you would be surprised how many environments I’ve seen where for instance MS SQL had a medium startup priority and vCenter a high priority. Or where after a complete power outage no one knows how to boot the vCenter Server. Documenting standard procedures is key here; especially know that with vSphere vCenter is more important than ever before.

Source:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009080
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009039
ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide
Upgrade Guide

Converting PowerShell data into an HTML report and save it to disk with no need for extra pipeline has long been my dream. Unfortunately, there’s no native Export-HTML cmdlet (unlike, say, Export-CSV), and ConvertTo-HTML does not have -Path parameter and only displays the html code on the screen (very useful ) unless you pipe it to Out-File.

So being inspired by Kirk adding parameters to Import-CSV and using PowerShell 2.0 code-snippets, I created my Export-HTML function, which behaves exactly like ConvertTo-HTML but adds optional -Path parameter to specify the output file.

Download it, copy/paste the function into PowerShell (or dot-source it, or include it in your PowerShell profile) and you will be able to do something like:

Get-Process | Export-Html -Path C:\pr.htm    or    Get-Process |  Export-Html C:\pr.htm -Title ‘My Processes’    or    Get-Process |  Export-Html C:\pr.htm -Property Name, Handles -Title ‘My Processes’

You can download the code here, or copy/paste it from the text below.

You may also consider renaming the function name from Export-HTML to ConvertTo-HTML (or use set-alias to make them the same thing), because the -Path parameter is optional, and old behavior of outputting HTML code to the console/pipeline is supported as well as all native parameters.

Here’s how I created this proxy function:

1. Downloaded and installed PowerShell 2.0 code snippets.
2. Used the function (proxy) snippet to generate the proxy for ConvertTo-
HTML.
3. Added Path to the parameters section:

    [Parameter(Position=0)]  [Alias('PSPath', 'FilePath')]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String]  ${Path},  

Added a variable to store modified PowerShell code to be executed:

$scriptCmdPipeline = ''

Added parameter handling in which I (if Path is present) append the Out-File code to the pipeline:

        if ($Path) {  $PSBoundParameters.Remove('Path') | Out-Null  $scriptCmdPipeline += " | Out-File -FilePath $Path"  }  

Got the original command-line for ConvertTo-HTML

        $scriptCmd = {& $wrappedCmd @PSBoundParameters}  

And added this new pipeline to it:

        $scriptCmd = $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.NewScriptBlock(  [string]$scriptCmd + $scriptCmdPipeline  )  

The rest was handled by the code snippet.

Here’s the resultant code:

#Requires -Version 2.0    <#  Export-Html behaves exactly like native ConvertTo-HTML  However it has one optional parameter -Path  Which lets you specify the output file: e.g.  Get-Process | Export-Html C:\temp\processes.html  #>    function Export-Html {  [CmdletBinding(DefaultParameterSetName='Page')]  param(  [Parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true)]  [System.Management.Automation.PSObject]  ${InputObject},    # Adding Path parameter   # (made it Position 0, and incremented Position for others)      [Parameter(Position=0)]  [Alias('PSPath', 'FilePath')]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String]  ${Path},    [Parameter(Position=1)]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.Object[]]  ${Property},    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Page', Position=4)]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String[]]  ${Body},    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Page', Position=2)]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String[]]  ${Head},    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Page', Position=3)]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String]  ${Title},    [ValidateSet('Table','List')]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String]  ${As},    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Page')]  [Alias('cu','uri')]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.Uri]  ${CssUri},    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Fragment')]  [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [Switch]  ${Fragment},    [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String[]]  ${PostContent},    [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  [System.String[]]  ${PreContent})    begin  {  try {  $outBuffer = $null  if ($PSBoundParameters.TryGetValue('OutBuffer', [ref]$outBuffer))  {  $PSBoundParameters['OutBuffer'] = 1  }  $wrappedCmd = $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.GetCommand('ConvertTo-Html',  [System.Management.Automation.CommandTypes]::Cmdlet)    # define string variable to become the target command line          #region Initialize helper variable to create command  $scriptCmdPipeline = ''  #endregion    # add new parameter handling          #region Process and remove the Path parameter if it is present  if ($Path) {  $PSBoundParameters.Remove('Path') | Out-Null  $scriptCmdPipeline += " | Out-File -FilePath $Path"  }  #endregion    $scriptCmd = {& $wrappedCmd @PSBoundParameters}    # redefine command invocation          #region Append our pipeline command to the wrapped command script block  $scriptCmd = $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.NewScriptBlock(  [string]$scriptCmd + $scriptCmdPipeline  )  #endregion    $steppablePipeline =  $scriptCmd.GetSteppablePipeline($myInvocation.CommandOrigin)  $steppablePipeline.Begin($PSCmdlet)  } catch {  throw  }  }    process  {  try {  $steppablePipeline.Process($_)  } catch {  throw  }  }    end  {  try {  $steppablePipeline.End()  } catch {  throw  }  }  <#    .ForwardHelpTargetName ConvertTo-Html  .ForwardHelpCategory Cmdlet    #>}

Hope you find this useful and it gets you the feature you wanted without waiting for PowerShell v3.

Tags: ConvertTo-HTML, Examples, Export-HTML, PowerGUI, PowerShell, PowerShell v2, Proxy functions, cmdlets
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