Winter Scripting Games 2014

Get Ready! The Winter Scripting Games 2014 are starting very soon !! The Event 1 is scheduled to start this week-end (Jan 19th 2014)! The Games are an amazing opportunity to learn more about PowerShell. This is the kind of thing you don't want to miss !!! 

Last year I jumped in for the first time in the 2013 edition and this was really a lot of fun !!! It gave me a huge boost to my PowerShell Skills and so much more confidence in my scripting style !!! You can refer to my old blog posts for each Scripting Games 2013 events were I tried to analyze each of my solutions.



Back at the beginning of December I was actually offered by +Mike Robbins to Coach the teams, but since I had so much fun playing at the last games I decided to play again this year, couldn't resist!!

For the 2014 Edition however, the formula of the Scripting Games is a bit different:

• Teams: This edition of the Scripting Games is a team work event ! No more Solo mode, participants have to create or join a team (from 2 to a maximum of 6 team members),
• Coaches: A list of experts will give advices/critics on the posted script via comments or blog posts.
• Judges: A team of MVPs and Well-known PowerShell Guru will scores each of the scripts.

Scripting Games 2013 - Advanced Event 5 - The Logfile Labyrinth

This is my solution for the Advanced Event 5.
I did not have much time to work on this event, but here is the script I submitted.

Instruction
Download [Skydrive]

Dr. Scripto finds himself in possession of a bunch of IIS log files, much like the one at
http://morelunches.com/files/powershell3/LogFiles.zip, if you need one to practice with. He’s keeping all of the log files in a folder, and he’s left the log files with their default filenames, which he’s given a .LOG filename extension. All of the files are for a single Web site, on a single Web server.

He’d like you to write a tool that accepts a path, and then simply scans through each file in that path somehow, generating a list of each unique client IP address that have been used to access the Web site. No IP address should appear more than once in your output, and you don’t need to sort the output in any way.

Your tool should optionally accept an IP address mask like “192.0.1.*” and only display IP addresses that match the specified pattern. If run without a pattern, display all IP addresses.

Regardless of the addresses found in the sample file linked above, you should assume that any legal IP address may appear in the files Dr. Scripto needs to scan. Your command should scan all of the files in the folder (and the folder doesn’t contain any other kind of file) and produce a single set of results. If an IP address appears in multiple log files and it’s likely that will be the case then your final output should still only list that IP address.

Scripting Games 2013 - Advanced Event 4 - An Auditing Adventure

This is my solution for the Advanced Event 4 of the Scripting Games 2013.
This event was a bit challenging for me... In the past, I played with Quest Active Directory snap-in to create a bunch of Monitoring tools and some other small automation tasks, but that's about it. (Example Monitor Active Directory Groups membership change).

Let's see how I solved it.

Scripting Games 2013 - Advanced Event 3 - A Disk Decision

This is my solution for the Advanced Event #3.
Unfortunately I don't expect a very high score in the Leader board since I did not submit the good version of my script... Shame.... But anyway I learned a bit from this event and wanted to share my solution. Hope this help someone out-there.

Instruction
Download [SkyDrive]

Dr. Scripto has been fielding a lot of calls from the Help Desk lately. They’ve been asking him to look up information about the local hard drives in various servers – mainly size and free space information. He doesn’t mind helping, but all the requests have been getting in the way of his naps. He’s asked you to write a tool comand that can get the information for the help desk – and theywants the output in an HTML file. The HTML file should look something like this:

The Doctor says you should parameterize your command – he wants to be able to pipe in one or more computer names as strings.The resulting HTML does need to go into an HTML file on disk someplace, and that file should have the computer name (e.g., the computer SERVER1 should have Server1.html, SERVER2 should have server2.html, and so on). A parameter should let him indicate the path (directory) to write the files to. Also, he wants you to pay special attention to the following:

• The browser displays “Disk Free Space Report” in the page tab when viewing the report.

• “Local Fixed Disk Report” is in the H2 (“Heading 2”) HTML style.If you can actually add the computer name to that – bonus!

• The report ends with an HTML horizontal rule and the date and time that the report was generated.

• The size and free space values are shown as gigabytes (GB) and megabytes (MB) respectively, each to two decimal places.

The command you write can assume that both WMI and CIM are available on the remote computers, and that all the necessary firewall rules and authentication have already been taken care of.

Solution

Finding the disk information
We'll have to use WMI/CIM to get this information on the remote computers.
To find which class to use, I typed the following commands:

Get-CimClass *disk*

Get-CimClass *disk* -PropertyName *size*

Scripting Games 2013 - Advanced Event 2 - An Inventory Intervention

Now that event 2 is closed for new entries. Here is the solution I proposed.

Instruction 
Download the instruction here [skydrive]

Dr. Scripto finally has the budget to buy a few new virtualization host servers, but he needs to make some room in the data center to accommodate them. He thinks it makes sense to get rid of his lowest-powered old servers first… but he needs to figure out which ones those are.
This is just the first wave, too – there’s more budget on the horizon so it’s possible he’ll need to run this little report a few times. Better make a reusable tool.

All of the virtualization hosts run Windows Server, but some of them don’t have Windows PowerShell installed, and they’re all running different OS versions. The oldest OS version is Windows 2000 Server (he knows, and he’s embarrassed  but he’s just been so darn busy). The good news is that they all belong to the same domain, and that you can rely on having a Domain Admin account to work with.

The good Doctor has asked you to write a PowerShell tool that can show him each server’s name, installed version of Windows, amount of installed physical memory, and number of installed processors. 
For processors, he’ll be happy getting a count of cores, or sockets, or even both – whatever you can reliably provide across all these different versions of Windows. He has a few text files with computer names – he’d like to pipe the computer names, as strings, to you tool, and have your tool query those computers.

Key Points

• Some Remote Server don't have PowerShell
• Different OS versions (oldest is Window Server 2000)
• Domain Environment, Domain Admin credential.
• Output of the script: ServerName, Version of Windows, Amount of Physical Memory, Processors Count, Sockets Count, Cores Count.
• Script can receive ComputerName injected via the pipeline

Scripting Games 2013 - Advanced Event 1 - An Archival Atrocity

Last week I was one of the lucky PowerShell Summit attendees and had the chance to assist to the official launch of the Scripting Games 2013 !! (with a special video created by Sean ;-)

Apart from the PowerShell stars like Ed Wilson, Don Jones, Bruce Payette, Alan Renouf, Lee Holmes, Richard Siddaway, Jeffery Snover.... I met some awesome people there and It was really cool to talk about our passion for PowerShell, How this amazing tool is saving our life each days!

Scripting Games 2013 - Advanced Event #1 - An Archival Atrocity

For the first time, I decided this year to participate to the Scripting Games 2013 organize and hosted by the PowerShell.org team.

I chose the Advanced Track and here is the first script I submitted yesterday.

Feel free to comment and send me your critics.

2013 Scripting Games - Competitor Guide

Don Jones just released the Competitor Guide for the 2013 Scripting Games online.

This year the Games will be hosted by PowerShell.org (Previous ones where organize by the Scripting Guy Ed Wilson). This event is scheduled to start during the PowerShell Summit in Seattle (between the 22nd and the 24th of April).

Make sure to read the Guidelines and check the different tracks available to you (Beginner or Advanced).

Download the Competitor Guide [PDF]

The Scripting Games is a great event for those who want to learn more or improve their skills with Windows PowerShell. I'm planning myself to participate to the Advanced Event. My Script will be post and explained here.

Winter Scripting Games 2013 - Practice Event 2

Just a quick post on the script I submit for the second practice event of the Winter Scripting Games 2013 (last week).

Practice Event 2 - Covering Your Assets

Your organization is preparing to renew maintenance contracts on all of your server computers. You need to provide management with a report that details each inventory information for each server. Most of the servers do not have Windows PowerShell installed. None of the servers a separated from your client computer by a firewall. Computer names may be specified by a variety of means; your function must accept any collection of strings as computer names.

Minimum Requirements 

Optional Criteria 

• Display optional verbose output showing the computer name being contacted
• Prompt for computer names if none are specified when the function is run
• Accept computer names as strings from the pipeline

Desired Output 

• ComputerName Model Manufacturer LogicalProcs PhysicalRAM BIOSSerial

My Script

# NAME  : Get-ComputerInventory
# AUTHOR: Francois-Xavier Cat
# EMAIL : fxcat@LazyWinAdmin.com
# DATE  : 2013/02/10 

Function Get-ComputerInventory {
        <#
        .SYNOPSIS 
        The Get-ComputerInventory function gets information about a local or 
        Remote machine(s) specified by the parameter ComputerName.
    

Winter Scripting Games 2013 - Practice Event 1

The Winter Scripting Games 2013 started last week with the first practice event.

Unfortunately for me, I was not able to post my script on time. The first Practice event was due on the Tuesday, 5th of February... 11:59 PM GMT! I assume I had until midnight my time..... (My timezone is East GMT-5) 

;-(

If you want to join the Winter Scripting Games, check the following TheScriptingGames website for more information and the The Competitor Guide.

Summary: Practice Event 1 - Sizing up the Disks

You have been asked to create a Windows PowerShell advanced function named Get-DiskSizeInfo. It must accept one or more computer names, and use WMI or CIM to query each computer. For each computer, it must display the percentage of free space, drive letter, total size in gigabytes, and free space in gigabytes. If a specified computer cannot be contacted, the function must log the computer name to C:\Errors.txt and display no error message.
Minimum Requirements 

Optional Criteria

• Display optional verbose output showing the computer name being contacted

My Script

Function Get-DiskSizeInfo {
        <#
        .DESCRIPTION
        Check the Disk(s) Size and remaining freespace.

        .PARAMETER ComputerName
        Specify the computername(s)

        .INPUTS
        System.String

        .OUTPUTS
        System.Management.Automation.PSObject