Pavleck.NET

You may notice the site will be in an erratic state for awhile. Just be patient. I need to re-organize and update a majority of the content as well as aggregate a lot of the fragments sitting out there.

This site will no longer be solely dedicated to Operations Manager. Instead, it will be focusing on automation & process improvement items – things to make our lives easier.

I’ll no longer be writing as the ‘elitist’ Senior OpsMgr Consultant which was my role for so many years – I’m now Joe SysAdmin. And as such, I’ll be tackling problems in that manner.

So except fewer Opsmgr posts, and more about dealing with opsmgr in the way most companies do; they pick Random System Admin guy, point a magic wand and say “You’re the OpsMgr Guy now”.

And this is how we’ll be solving problems from here on out.

Real, every day problems. A lot of them will clearly be hacks, but some of them will be quite wonderful.

On that note – if you’re a C# developer and would like to collaborate with me to get the OpsMgr Web Service to a state I feel is acceptable to distribute, please email me and lets start a dialog about all this.

Jeremy

Or you could also title this “How to talk your company into buying you a high end gaming rig for your desktop”

So I’ve been playing with this web service I’m writing for OpsMgr. I was doing a bunch of practical things with it, that you’d normally want to do with it – but then I thought screw that, let’s do something fun with it.

I like to play Team Fortress 2. I like to monitor things. Why not put them together?

Well friends, once you’ve made a web service that talks to the system, it’s fairly trivial to write something to take that information and put it somewhere else.

Let me demonstrate (And yes, you probably do want to click and view the larger version of this)

Stay Tuned…. Video coming soon.

Alas, with the ending of my 12th month as a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, ends it, period. I didn’t get renewed.

Just as well though.

I could go on a slight diatribe about it all, but I’ll just keep it bottled in.

Until then, let me tell you, writing a web service is a lot harder than I thought – I might be eliciting the help of the community at some point. And yes, I am still slowly trudging along with it. It’s mainly been redesign redesign redesign. Though I’m hoping to have something ‘soon’.

So a couple of weeks ago on the MVP mailing list someone asked the question on how to best integrate SiteScope with OpsMgr. Ever the SDK/Powershell lover I immediately replied that “Hey, there’s some code in the SDK about making a webservice, we’ll just do that and then you can write a script to talk to opsmgr”.¹

Well, lo and behold I was wrong. It wasn’t actually sample code for a web service, but the code to talk to one you wrote.

So I started writing one.

Since I’ve started working again I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on code – so I’ve been messing with this for about 30 mins or so a day. Right now it doesn’t really work very well, creating an XML web service is all new to me. But if you read my last post, you know that once this is finished you’ll have a system that you’ll be able to manipulate from any system that can talk to it, which is almost anything – Linux, Unix, Mac, etc.

So I’m going to keep at this, and hopefully have something to release to you guys eventually. I’ll start small, just a few functions, then slowly add to it over time.

So while it doesn’t even really work yet, I just couldn’t help but show you guys. I’m pretty exited about this!

1. Yes, I know, there already exists a connector, but it’s old and isn’t optimal [↩]

Yesterday, posted quietly as KB article 968929, Microsoft officially released PowerShell 2.0

Why is that cool? Because now you can get PoSh 2 officially deployed to all your servers. And you get to “officially” use the coolest CmdLet in the bunch: New-WebServiceProxy

Now, if you were to just read the help about it, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting:

Creates a Web service proxy object that lets you use and manage the Web service in Windows PowerShell.

But I’m going to give you an awesome secret. There’s a webservice out there unlike any other. If you want to sell PoSh to your coworkers, this is the way to do it.

What is it?

WebServiceX.Net provides On Demand XML Web Services for Financial,Distribution, Retail, Health Care, Manufacturing, Telecom, Government and Educational Industry.

So, what’s the mean to us?

Well using our shiny new cmdLet and a few lines of code we can instantly access data for over 70 different services. So really it comes down to “What do you want to do?”

Get the weather? No problem.

BAM. Done.

Oh, you don’t live in the US? No worries either.

Lets see how the weather of a certain favorite MS employee is.

Wow, Stefan better grab a coat, it’s chilly there.

Ok, those were interesting in an ‘yeah, I’ve seen that before’ way – but what else?

A simple-as-pie domain whois? You know it’s there.

BAM!

Next?

How about searching Lloyd’s for the risk code for a given item. Sure, we got it.

BAM!

Apparently it’s risk code is 6T. No idea what that all means.

I could go on all day – there is so much information out there. From Acceleration Unit Converters, Sunset and Sunrise times, RSS Readers, Translation services, Barcode generation, Text to Braille – hell, it’ll even let you send Free SMS messages and Faxes to anyone!

As you can tell, it’s a pretty expansive list, with many options and a whole ton of data. Not always what you want when you’re trying to do a little Posh-Fu. So that’s why I’m working on a little script for you to dot source, one that “PoShifies” these various services and gives you a lot more options on the command line – look for that soon!

Oh, and before I forget – be sure to check out the PowerScripting Podcast tomorrow night because you’re in for a treat! Me, Marco Shaw, Marcus Oh and Scott Moss will be giving a little panel discussion about PowerShell in OpsMgr – the Command Shell as we’ve come to call it. So come listen in, ask some questions, and maybe win some sweet sweet schwag!

Alas, it seems those Danes are just as goofy as I am. And I’m happy to hear it!

Jakob Svendsen over at CoreTech released a management pack today. That management pack will alert you when the coffee in your coffee pot gets low. I’ll go ahead and embed the video below, but you’ll have to go to their site to download it.

Now, I return to my dank and dark office, where I shall create a SUPERIOR coffee pot monitor!
I’m actually waiting on an order from SparkFun and Jameco to get here as we speak.

Now here’s an awesome bit of good news! Just announced the OpsMgr R2 Authoring Resource Kit! It’s available at this URL.

I am REALLY excited about this! Why? Well let’s check out all the cool stuff we’re getting:

• Management Pack Best Practices Analyzer
  MPBPA scans management packs for best practice compliance and provides automated resolution for numerous issues. This tool integrates with the Authoring Console.
• Management Pack Spell Checker
  MP Spell Checker checks spelling in management packs to eliminate errors in display strings.
• Management Pack Visio Generator
  MP Visio Generator allows you to generate a class inheritance and class relationship diagram using Microsoft Office Visio.
• Management Pack Diff
  MP Diff shows the differences between two management packs.
• Management Pack Cookdown Analyzer
  MP Cookdown Analyzer identifies workflows which may break cookdown.  Suggestions are provided for how to fix the performance problems.
• All Reference Add-in
  All References Add-in helps find all management pack elements that reference the specific element chosen. For example, the ability to right click a class and find all rules, monitors, overrides, as well as anything else that targets that class is provided. This tool works on most management pack elements.
• Workflow Analyzer
  The Workflow Analyzer provides the ability to statically analyze all types of workflows.  It also allows users to trace workflows running on any Health Service.
• Workflow Simulator
  The Workflow Simulator provides the ability to test certain types of workflows such as discoveries, rules, and monitors without a Management Server and Management Group. Key functionality includes the ability to test workflows as well as view and validate output prior to signing and importing the MP into a Management Group for additional testing.
• Management Packs
  Three management packs which are frequently used as dependencies are provided as part of the tools installation.  These MPs are necessary to allow the Authoring Console to open most MPs available online in the System Center Operations Manager MP Catalog.

This is great news! Finally we’ve all been given the power to generate powerful, extensive management packs. You will be able to build it, diagram it, and most importantly – test it for quality assurance. No longer will we be left guessing if a certain change is better or worse – we’ll be able to find out ourselves!

If you’re still hesitant to dive into powershell, you’re not alone. To someone who is a light scripter or has limited or no development background it can seem like a daunting task. A lot of the examples you’ll find are easy and simple, but Write-Host –Fore Green “Hello World! I’m using PowerShell” won’t help you with automating all of those tasks out there.

There are a few places to go, and a few books to read, to help you get up to speed with it.
One of the most promising looking resources would have to be Doug Finke’s “Try PowerShell”.

Try PowerShell  is an interactive PowerShell tutorial created with PowerShell using WPF¹ and PowerBoots.
With it you can easily try out PowerShell commands just by clicking on them, no typing needed. You can search for particular commands, run them, and even edit them to see what happens if you change something. This is an awesome tool I don’t think enough people know about.

Read more…

1. Wikipedia: Windows Presentation Foundation [↩]

Is anyone else in the OpsMgr community using Google Wave yet? If you’re not yet ‘in the know’, Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

I recently received my invite to it, and have setup a System Center Operations Manager wave to test it out. If you’re a member too, please add jpavleck@gmail.com to your contact list, and I’ll add you to it.

If you’re not a member yet, but would like to be, they’re still handing out invites – just go to the Wave Signup form and fill in your information. If you’re still not sure what it actually is, check out Google’s own “About Google Wave”, read about it on its Wikipedia page, or have a look at the preview video released in May.

Unemployment, it has it’s good and bad points.

The good points? In between job interviews and calls from recruiters for jobs I’m not even close to being qualified for (Senior Solaris Architect.. What?) I have more then enough time to work on neat things with OpsMgr. Showing you all the awesome things you can do with it, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.

The bad points? Well, mainly the lack of funds to buy some of the stuff I need to make the cool stuff to show you – but you can help me there!

One of the neat things I’ve been working with OpsMgr is integrating it into the physical world. Creating a connector to read from, and interact with, things outside of the server room. So one of the biggest things you could gift me (Consider it a late 33rd birthday present if you like) is a gift certificate to SparkFun Electronics.

What will I do with that? Well, depending on just how much I get I plan to get the following devices (In order of importance)

• RFID USB Reader and RFID Tags
• Magnetic Card Reader/Writer and blank cards
• Thermocouples (Temperature Sensors)
• Infrared Emitter & Detector
• Proximity Sensors
• Force and various other sensors

And a few other things as well. In total, it’s several hundred dollars worth of parts – but I don’t expect that from anyone, just a little will do.

I’m also always looking for things to expand my network to better bring you a more in-depth OpsMgr experience. So I’m also looking for complete servers¹ as well as peripherals such as external tape drives and hard drives. If you have something to donate, please feel free to email me and let me know. If you’d rather donate with your bank account, I’ve added a donate button below – every donation of at least $5 will also come with a Pavleck.NET lanyard – I have a bunch of them left and would love to get rid of some of them.

Thanks, and now I’m back to the console!

1. Either quad core workstations or ‘real’ servers such as Proliant 380s, fairly modern [↩]