Everyday Powershell - Part 17 - Using new-mailboxexportrequest with NON-US dates

Here's a crazy making problem!

The new-mailboxexportrequest commandlet will only accept dates in US formats. Roland Paix has made this post about the issue. The conclusion is switch your culture to EN-US before loading powershell. Sooo frustrating! But hey, something has to be the default datetime and Microsoft is an American company. No point getting emotional, let's just fix it.

Here's a neat trick you can use to set the Culture of the "Current Thread" you are running.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Threading") [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Globalization") [System.Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::CreateSpecificCulture("en-us") Add-PSSnapin *exchange* $start = (get-date).adddays(-28) $end = (get-date).adddays(-14) $filter = "(Received -gt '"+$start+"') -and (Received -lt '"+$end+"')" new-Mailboxexportrequest -mailbox SOMEMAILBOX -ContentFilter $filter -filepath C:\SOME.pst

This should trick new-mailboxexportrequest into believing that your dates are in the "correct" format!

Everyday Powershell - Part 16 - Monitoring Disk Performance in Powershell

Welcome back to another Everyday Powershell post. It's not powershell we POST every day, it's powershell you could USE everyday.

Today we look at get-counter which you should have a fiddle with if you get the chance. It does a lot more than what we've used it for here. But this may help you get the gist of running performance counters in powershell.

$disks = Get-WmiObject win32_logicaldisk | Where-Object {$_.DriveType -eq 3} | select DeviceID $report = @() $i=1 foreach ($disk in $disks) {     Write-Progress -Activity "Mesuring disk performance" -Status $disk.DeviceID -PercentComplete (($i/$disks.Count)*100)     $temp = "" | select Disk, Read, Write     $temp.disk = $disk.deviceid     $counter = "\LogicalDisk(" + ($disk.deviceid) + ")\Avg. Disk sec/Read"     $temp.read = ((Get-Counter -Counter $counter).CounterSamples.cookedvalue)*1000     $counter = "\LogicalDisk(" + ($disk.deviceid) + ")\Avg. Disk sec/Write"     $temp.write = ((Get-Counter -Counter $counter).CounterSamples.cookedvalue)*1000     $report += $temp     $i++ } $report

We've included the now ubiquitous write-progess to give a useful progress indicator. As well as the old $temp="" | select which sets up a hash table for us to dump data into.

Everyday Powershell Returns! - Find exchange mailbox size

Fresh from an ass kicking at the Winter Scripting games we're back with another useful bit of Powershell!

We're building our Exchange 2013 environment now and have a burning need to see what our users mailboxes look like, in terms of the space they consume.

This little script did the trick for us and helped us plan our new information store layout.

Add-PSSnapin *exchange* $users = Get-ADUser -searchbase "DC=somedomain,DC=com" -Filter * -Properties department $report = @() $count = $users.count $i = 0 foreach ($user in $users) {     $i++     $prog = ($i/$count) * 100     Write-Progress -Activity "Processing..." -percentcomplete $prog -CurrentOperation $user.samaccountname      $temp = ""| select Person, mailboxsize, itemcount, Team, Function     $mailboxstats = Get-MailboxStatistics $user.samaccountname     $temp.person = $user.samaccountname     $temp.mailboxsize = $mailboxstats.totalitemsize.value.toMB()     $temp.itemcount = $mailboxstats.itemcount     $temp.team = $user.department     $report += $temp } $report

Should be pretty self explanatory. Ask a question in the comments if you'd like clarification of anything. 

What I learnt at the Winter Scripting Games - Part 4

Great news!

We scored in the positives for event 2! Even got some good feeback from the judges. Great work Team Awesome...

Bad news!

We didn't get anything submitted for event 3. Missed an opportunity to capitalize on what we've learnt so far. Still there's event 4 to come.

We did get a decent function together for setting ACLs so event 3 wasn't a total write off.

For us it's more about have fun leaning challenges than the score anyway.

What I learned at the Winter Scripting Games - Part 3 - The Importance of Help

That’s what we learnt in event 1 of the scripting games. Our team of enthusiastic novices threw together a script that we thought met most of the requirements. It wasn't pretty and didn't include any comments or help.

Once the scoring was done we came out a -4. MINUS FOUR! Ouch.

Looking at the scoring criteria it became clear why. Much of the scoring seems to be around building the right kinds of good practice into your script.

We lost points on;

• Appropriate use of Try/Catch
• Appropriate use of verbose output including -Verbose support
• Correct management of pipeline input
• Appropriate use of parameter validation attributes
• Comment- or file-based help
• File names include date of production
• Code shared between solutions

This is all pretty simple stuff that could almost be built into a script “template”. We’ll be working on that for future Events.

 So what we've learned is that the logic in your script isn't the best way to score points. I was pretty happy with our solution, give that it was produced by 3 novice scripters. OK 2 novices and me… A ‘Senior Novice’.

It was a great learning experience and the emotional kick of scoring NEGATIVE points made it clear how valuable it is to build this good practice stuff into our scripts.  

What I learned at the Winter Scripting Games - Part 2

Our scripts for event 1 have been uploaded but they were far from finished. I blame Australia Day for eating our last Saturday of free time. There's a reason it's called National Drunk Day... It's the day we're Drunk all Day.

Our team "Awesome" has 4 members, 2 complete newbies, 1 observer and Me. We've taken on a bit of work trying to learn as we go but it's been really illuminating even if we're not getting all the way through the events.

We're learning to collaborate on distributed software projects

We're learning about setting up functions to run with pipe lined input

We're learning about all that help stuff that's at the top of everyone's scripts

We're learning to teach each other about the fundamentals of computer programming

Just deciding to be in the event and have a go puts us ahead of the majority. We're not expecting to take gold in any events, that's not what this is about. We get interesting problems that have been hand picked to teach us something. We have to work together and come up with working solutions and that experience has been invaluable already!

Everyday Powershell - Part 15 - Reading event logs with specific date ranges

Last post we were talking about using specific dates in our event log checker... So here's how;

$ComputerName = "SOMESERVER" [String[]]$EventLogNames=@("Application","System")#Main eventlogs $EventStartDate = get-date -date "18/12/2013 7:00pm" #(Get-Date).addhours(-1) $EventEndTime = get-date -date "18/12/2013 9:00pm" #(Get-Date).addhours(-0) $EventCritea = @{logname = $EventLogNames; StartTime=$EventStartDate; EndTime=$EventEndTime} Get-WinEvent -ComputerName $ComputerName -FilterHashTable $EventCritea  -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | fl

Pretty simple really.