CBTr.Net Tech Dump

A couple of days ago, I was the generic group-objects cmdlet:

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Get-Service | Group status

This command showed me the numbers of running and stopped services on a computer. The count column is fine and all but the [Group] column itself looked like this:

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Group
-----
{System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController, System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController, S...
{System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController, System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController, S...

I wanted to see the service name beyond the ‘…’. To get that information returned back to you, you can use the following; It will list you all the services that are stopped. Change the array from [0] to [1] will show you the running services:

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(Get-Service | Group status)[0].group

A few days ago, a dev provided me with an application. The application output some stuff to the screen and I wanted to capture this output and redirect it to a batch file. My command is:

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echo "def" | out-File test.bat

At first glance, the batch file looks good. However when I attempted to execute the batch file, I got the error:

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C:\Users\kwsvc\Desktop>■d
'■d' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

So I’m sitting here looking at the file trying to determine where this stupid illegal character is; notepad.exe and notepad++ couldn’t see anything wrong. What give?

Well, to see what the issue is, I had to fire up the binary editor. Turns out, at the beginning of the file, there are two illegal characters. Their binary code is: FF FE. Not only that, there is a binary code of: 00 between every character in the text file. For example:

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FF FE 64 00 65 00 66 00 OD 00 0A   . . d . e . f

The FF FE indicate that this file was outputted using .Net-standard Unicode encoding and is Powershell’s default string format. The fix is to run the following:

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echo "def" | out-File filename -encoding ascii

Use the following to execution plans that’s cached on the SQL server.

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SELECT [cp].[refcounts]
,[cp].[usecounts]
,[cp].[objtype]
,[st].[dbid]
,[st].[objectid]
,[st].[text]
,[qp].[query_plan]
FROM sys.dm_exec_cached_plans cp
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(cp.plan_handle) st
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(cp.plan_handle)
qp;

Over the past 3 weeks, I’ve built over 40 pairs of active/active cluster on Windows 2003. I’ve looked around the web, to see if someone has any type of script that will help me, but alas, everyone wants to show me how to PnC (point & click) my way thru the bullshit GUI.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the GUI but when I’m setting up a crap load of A/A cluster servers, I want everything to be automated or as automated as possible. I ended up writing my own script. All you need to do is past in the correct variables and make sure you are on the server you are trying to create the shared folder. If not, you will definitely be in for a surprise!

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get-content server.txt| foreach {
$strComputer = $_
$colItems = get-wmiobject -class "Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration" `
-computername $strComputer | Where{$_.IpEnabled -Match "True"}
foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {
   write-host $strComputer " : " $objItem.IPAddress
}
}

in the server.txt file, one server per line and no extra space at the end of each server.