PowerShell Tip - Escape Regex MetaCharacters

Last week I worked on a Scorch PowerShell script that is looking for duplicate Incident Requests inside SCSM by checking new incoming request and existing ticket already in the system.

One of the script step is to look for a match between two strings, something similar to the following:

$String1 = "Title:[PowerShell Rocks!]"
$String2 = "Title:[PowerShell Rocks!]"

$String1 -match $String2

Straight forward you would think! And at first I was surprised to see the result $FALSE ... yep...to "ass-u-me"...

PowerShell - NetBackupPS: Module for Symantec NetBackup

In my previous job, we used Symantec NetBackup to handle backups and restores. To handle some of the reporting, the storage admins were using the Symantec CLI tools (bunch of Exe).
Example of usages: Find the scratch tapes in a particular robot... or in a particular site...

I wanted to parse the output and be able to reuse the information for other commands or to report information to the team. I realised that could be a good exercice to improve my parsing skills using PowerShell and decided to work on some more cmdlets and eventually a module.

PowerShell/SCSM - Finding the GUID of an object

Retrieving the GUID of an object in SCSM using PowerShell is sometime a bit challenging. For the WorkItems, this piece of information is not present in any Property available, you have to invoke the get_id method to retrieve it.

There is an 'ID' property which is misleading, it contains the number of the request, for example IR123456.

And for some other type of objects, such as the DomainUser or Enumeration objects the GUID is the..... ID property.

PowerShell/SCSM - Install and Config the SMlets Module

If you follow my blog, you might have noticed that I recently started to post about SCSM. We just finished to migrate to a new SCSM environment in Azure (Iaas) while using Cireson Portal as a front end.

Of course of lot of the automation part is handled by SCORCH in the background which rely on a lot of PowerShell :-)  (We don't use SMA yet, but I will soon look into it)

Anyway I just wanted to post a quick article on how to configure SMlets on a workstation to be able to query SCSM.

PowerShell - ConvertFrom-String and the TemplateFile parameter

I'm continuing to play with the new ConvertFrom-String cmdlet (available in the last WMF 5.0 September preview released yesterday) which make the parsing job really easy for simple or complex output.

This cmdlets supports two types of modes: Basic Delimited Parsing (See yesterday's post) and the Auto-Generated Example-Driven Parsing which I will cover in this post.

This Auto-Generated Example-Driven Parsing mode is based on the FlashExtract research work in Microsoft Research...

Important: This post is based on the September 2014 preview release of WMF 5.0. This is pre-release software, so this information may change.

PowerShell - Playing with the new ConvertFrom-String cmdlet

In a previous post I talked about parsing NetStat.exe using PowerShell and some regex, It is a fun exercice but require some knowledge to figure out how the parsing should happen.

Today, It got way easier !! The PowerShell Team just released a new version of the WMF : v5 September preview ! And One of the coolest feature is the new ConvertFrom-String cmdlet.

EDIT (2014/10/02): See also my post about using ConvertFrom-String and the param -TemplateFile against Netstat.exe

Using the same example from my previous post, I will perform a simple parsing of netstat.exe -n and send the output to ConvertFrom-String.

Important: This post is based on the September 2014 preview release of WMF 5.0. This is pre-release software, so this information may change.

PowerShell - WMF 5.0 July preview uninstallation fails

Today the PowerShell Team released a new version of the WMF : v5 September preview, I really like the faster beta cycle !

Having the beta preview already installed (July version), I first open Add/Remove Programs (appwiz.cpl) and start to uninstall this version (KB2969050).

Once the uninstallation is completed, Windows ask to reboot. However at the next boot I get a message saying the Update did not work and Windows is Undoing the change, reverting to the previous state...then reboot again.

PowerShell - Sum similar entries from multiple CSV files

One of my script is scheduled to download everyday the proxy logs files from multiple proxies (Approx 1>2GB per file) of the previous day. The second step is to parse each of them and get the top 200 domain names within a specific environment. Finally at the end of the month another script create a report on the monthly internet usage.

I thought this was an interesting exercise even if some tools would probably do a better job ($$$). Also we shouldn't take those results too seriously since some protocols like Ajax or HTML5 talk a lot to the servers, keep refreshing pages even if you are not actively working on them.

In this post, I will talk about the last part of this process and how I combine all those files to get a real monthly top domains.