Archive: 2012/5

2012

MicrosoftOpsMgr 2012

OpsMgr 2012 Agent & Gateway Failover - The Basics [#opsmgr, #powershell]

I have previously posted a few scripts on managing and configuring fail-over management servers on gateways and agents in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Now that System Center 2012 Operations Manager is RTM and users are starting to explore the differences between the versions I see more and more questions on how you do, in OpsMgr 2012, what you did in OpsMgr 2007. In a few posts henceforth I will go through Agent and Gateway server fail-over configuration and management. In this first post I’ll look at the very basics of fail-over configuration, the cmdlets to use and some one-liners.

MicrosoftOpsMgr 2012

Load-balanced SCOM2012 SDK Services for Network Illiterates [#opsmgr, #nlb]

Prelude Now that System Center Operations Manager no longer has that pesky Root Management Server role; a server role that in larger environments quickly became the choking point and made creating a fully Highly Available SCOM-environment both complex and frustrating to support and with little gain at that. With that gone and the SDK Service, or Data Access Service, thriving on all the Management Servers HA suddenly became pretty simple. All you have to do in SCOM2012 to make sure your management groups keep on kicking is to have at-least two Management Servers and your databases clustered. This new distributed architecture does not only give easy HA, it also makes it possible to connect to the SDK-service—be it using the Operations Console or powershell to name two options—on any Management Server. This, in turn, provides for a completely new level of scalability. Choked on sessions? Deploy a new Management Server! Anyway… given all this scalability and HA, would it not be nice if you could load-balance all these SDK-sessions you will be running from System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Service Manager, System Center Orchestrator, regular scheduled powershell scripts and what-not? Of course it would! And you can! The simple solution is to use the built-in Network Load Balancer (NLB for short) feature in Windows Server and that’s what we’re going to discuss in this post. Before we go, I’d like to point to a great article written by Justin Cook that is covering most bases but in a less for-dummies way. So, yeah… I suppose this is the for-dummies version then. 😉 Enjoy!

CodePoSH

Quick-Hack: Send SMS through Powershell [#powershell]

Decided to do a quick-hack/fast-publish on this one as I have had a bit less time to create a nice clean production-ready version as of yet… and people has been asking about how far off the article is. What this script does is to send a text message using a GSM/GPRS modem connected to a local (or LAN-connected with local drivers) serial port using Powershell. Disclaimer! This script “works” but is not fit for production. See it as an example of the general concept to evolve and adapt into something worthy of production use. What’s missing in the latest iteration is: A working Event-Handler to deal with asynchronous call-backs. Support for AT+MSGW (write to modem memory) Reusing messages in modem memory for multiple recipients. Various error- and exeption-handlers. Actually verifying that the modem is AT-capable. Querying the system for available modems and their ports. The Script So, a short note before digging into the script. Prerequisites for this script is that you have identified which COM-port to use and it’s supported baud-rates and whether it supports DTR or not. If you do not know what the hell I am talking about, you could probably have it work with my preconfigured settings anyway. If you are unsure about if your modem supports AT commands you could open a serial connection to the modem using Hyperterminal or PuTTY and run AT+CMGF=1. If supported, the return should be OK. If it is not supported (you get ERROR instead) you would have to use PDU-mode which require a bit of hex-encoding of your messages. This is nothing I have had to do yet and will not be including in this script. Maybe in the future. Maybe. So, looking a some powershelling then. First thing would be to connect to the modem. # Create your instance of the SerialPort Class$serialPort = new-Object System.IO.Ports.SerialPort# Set various COM-port settings$serialPort.PortName = "COM1"$serialPort.BaudRate = 19200$serialPort.WriteTimeout = 500$serialPort.ReadTimeout = 3000$serialPort.DtrEnable = "true"# Open the connection$serialPort.Open()

Technobabble

Rant - The Concept of Booth-Babes

Background Having visited a few conferences in the last years I have spotted a trend I didn’t think I would see in the IT-Pro sphere. You could probably call me naïve for that but logically we should not encourage this trend. This is my appeal to all exhibitors of future conferences to re-evaluate the concept of booth-babes. I will not go into the genus-political part of this discussion as of now–others are more eloquent and fit to handle that–but rather some of the more pragmatic sides to ditch the BB (short for Booth-Babe) and how that would gain us visitors as well as the exhibitors. I will also keep a pretty frank, and perhaps impolite, tone in this rant of mine. So, here’s my top reasons, in no particular order, to give up the BBs.