<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>Articles from November 2013 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!https://powershell.org/articles/2013/11/Recent content in Articles from November 2013 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!Hugoen-usCommunity Book of PowerShell Practiceshttps://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-14-community-book-of-powershell-practices/https://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-14-community-book-of-powershell-practices/Thu, 14 Nov 2013 18:36:30 +0000<p>Released in our new Git repo: _The Community Book of PowerShell Practices, _an ongoing book started from this past Summer&rsquo;s &ldquo;Great Debates&rdquo; blog post series. Grab it from https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/ebooks/blob/master/Practices/2013Sep_Practices/2013Sep_Practices.doc and enjoy!</p><![CDATA[

Released in our new Git repo: _The Community Book of PowerShell Practices, _an ongoing book started from this past Summer’s “Great Debates” blog post series. Grab it from https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/ebooks/blob/master/Practices/2013Sep_Practices/2013Sep_Practices.doc and enjoy!

]]>Last chance for feedback on PowerShell course 10961A/Bhttps://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-14-last-chance-for-feedback-on-powershell-course-10961ab/https://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-14-last-chance-for-feedback-on-powershell-course-10961ab/Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:45:34 +0000<p>I&rsquo;m in the midst of working on 10961C, the Windows Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1 / PowerShell 4.0 update of Microsoft&rsquo;s 10961A/B course, &ldquo;Automating Administration with Windows PowerShell.&rdquo; I anticipate this being closed out by the end of November, 2013, so if you&rsquo;ve taken or taught this course and have any feedback - even a typo - now&rsquo;s the time to tell me. Drop a comment below, or e-mail me (if you have my address). Please, no Twitter replies on this one.<br> The course will not be substantially changed from the B rev; because PowerShell v4 doesn&rsquo;t <em>change</em> much, especially at the entry-level covered by 10961, there wasn&rsquo;t much to alter. But I&rsquo;m trying to sweep up as many lingering bugs and typos as possible. Kudos to MCT Jason Yoder for firing over a list of fixes!</p><![CDATA[

I’m in the midst of working on 10961C, the Windows Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1 / PowerShell 4.0 update of Microsoft’s 10961A/B course, “Automating Administration with Windows PowerShell.” I anticipate this being closed out by the end of November, 2013, so if you’ve taken or taught this course and have any feedback - even a typo - now’s the time to tell me. Drop a comment below, or e-mail me (if you have my address). Please, no Twitter replies on this one.
The course will not be substantially changed from the B rev; because PowerShell v4 doesn’t change much, especially at the entry-level covered by 10961, there wasn’t much to alter. But I’m trying to sweep up as many lingering bugs and typos as possible. Kudos to MCT Jason Yoder for firing over a list of fixes!

Some fun comments from the “A” rev feedback:

 By day 3 (5 day class) most students felt over-whelmed.
 There is not enough material.
 Probably won't be reconciling those two . Fact is, it's really tough to write the perfect course for *everyone*, which is why having a live instructor who knows the material is so important to a great class.
>

No mention of filtering functions.

 Because they're largely "leftovers" that were succeeded by pipeline functions. That said, 10961 isn't a programming course; that's where 55039 picks up. If you've got folks who want programming taking 10961, they were placed into the wrong class.
]]>PhillyPoSH 11/07/2013 meeting summary and presentation materialshttps://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-12-phillyposh-11072013-meeting-summary-and-presentation-materials/https://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-12-phillyposh-11072013-meeting-summary-and-presentation-materials/Wed, 13 Nov 2013 02:07:36 +0000<ol> <li><a href="http://mellositmusings.com/">John Mello</a> gave a presentation on a script that searches a mailbox for an email by subject and downloads any attachments it may contain. A copy of his scripts can be obtained <a href="http://mellositmusings.com/2013/10/29/powershell-script-to-download-attachments-from-an-email/">here.</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.jasonhelmick.com/">Jason Helmick</a>, Senior Technologist at <a href="http://concentratedtech.com/">Concentrated Tech</a> and <a href="http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/mvp/Jason%20Helmick-5000354">Windows PowerShell MVP</a>, gave a presentation on &ldquo;Understanding the Pipeline &ldquo;“ Getting your one-liners to work!&rdquo; A copy of his script can be found <a href="https://powershell.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PhillyPosh_11_07_2013_Jason_Helmick.zip">here</a>. <ol> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVsMbxj6188">A recording of Jason Helmick&rdquo;™s presentation</a> can be found on our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAc_ow5FIJtRpvew__9Iqzg">YouTube channel</a>. Due to audio issues, John Mello&quot;™s portion is not included in the recording.</li> </ol> </li> <li>Announcements <ol> <li>Tickets are still available for the <a href="https://powershell.org/community-events/summit/powershell-summit-north-america/">2014 PowerShell Summit North America</a>, if you&quot;™re going then make sure to say hi to <a href="http://paglia.org/">Lido Paglia</a>!</li> <li>We are still trying to arrange for a PowerShell Saturday sometime in 2014, if you are interested in presenting please let us know!</li> </ol> </li> <li>We are assigning homework this week! Hopefully this will be a fun task that we can discuss during our next meeting, so try your hand at the following problem:</li> </ol> <p><strong>Title</strong>: On This Day in Pictures</p><![CDATA[
  1. John Mello gave a presentation on a script that searches a mailbox for an email by subject and downloads any attachments it may contain. A copy of his scripts can be obtainedhere.
  2. Jason Helmick, Senior Technologist atConcentrated Tech and Windows PowerShell MVP, gave a presentation on “Understanding the Pipeline ““ Getting your one-liners to work!” A copy of his script can be foundhere.
    1. A recording of Jason Helmick”™s presentation can be found on ourYouTube channel. Due to audio issues, John Mello"™s portion is not included in the recording.
  3. Announcements
    1. Tickets are still available for the2014 PowerShell Summit North America, if you"™re going then make sure to say hi toLido Paglia!
    2. We are still trying to arrange for a PowerShell Saturday sometime in 2014, if you are interested in presenting please let us know!
  4. We are assigning homework this week! Hopefully this will be a fun task that we can discuss during our next meeting, so try your hand at the following problem:

Title: On This Day in Pictures

Description: You have folder of photos on your computer that you take with your Smartphone or digital camera. From time to time you want to be reminded of the cool and interesting things you snapped photos of years before on this day. Being a PowerShell scripter you imagine that PowerShell would be a quick and easy tool for exploring your photo"™s meta-data to re-discover some fun memories you had by emailing yourself some pictures you took on this same day last year or any year before. You decide to format the email as HTML including the pictures and some data about them. Finally, using the task scheduler to set your script to run every morning so you can take a trip down memory lane with your photos on “this day in history”. As a PowerShell scripter you roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Requirements:

  • Your script should look into a directory that may contain sub folders for image files (you may want to support .jpg, .jpeg, .png, etc.).

  • The script should then determine the date a photo was taken. Examining theEXIF meta-data might be handy.

  • Get the date the script runs and find all the photos taken on the same day other than the current year.

  •  Finally send an email containing the photos taken on this day in history*

]]>Login now required for commentshttps://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-11-login-now-required-for-comments/https://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-11-login-now-required-for-comments/Mon, 11 Nov 2013 14:49:05 +0000<p>A quick note and an apology: I&rsquo;ve had to modify the site configuration to require users to be registered and logged in before they can comment. We&rsquo;ve been taking a <em>ridiculous</em> amount of comment spam, and it&rsquo;s consuming more and more time to weed through it.<br> You can register using any major social media account, so you don&rsquo;t have to remember yet another username and password with us, so hopefully that&rsquo;ll mitigate the inconvenience.<br> Have a great week!</p><![CDATA[

A quick note and an apology: I’ve had to modify the site configuration to require users to be registered and logged in before they can comment. We’ve been taking a ridiculous amount of comment spam, and it’s consuming more and more time to weed through it.
You can register using any major social media account, so you don’t have to remember yet another username and password with us, so hopefully that’ll mitigate the inconvenience.
Have a great week!

]]>Monitoring SQL Server Backupshttps://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-06-monitoring-sql-server-backups/https://powershell.org/articles/2013-11-06-monitoring-sql-server-backups/Thu, 07 Nov 2013 07:30:31 +0000<p>One of the most important tasks for the** **DBAs is to ensure that there is a maintenance plan to recover data from a given disaster.   As a DBA we need to design a maintenance plan according to our scenario and business requirements. Do we want to be able to recover data at any point of time? How much data loss can we accept? All these questions and many more must be answered before designing the plan. In this post we will assume a basic daily full backup to keep our data safe, we will assume that there is a job performing full backups to our databases every day at midnight.</p><![CDATA[

One of the most important tasks for the** **DBAs is to ensure that there is a maintenance plan to recover data from a given disaster.   As a DBA we need to design a maintenance plan according to our scenario and business requirements. Do we want to be able to recover data at any point of time? How much data loss can we accept? All these questions and many more must be answered before designing the plan. In this post we will assume a basic daily full backup to keep our data safe, we will assume that there is a job performing full backups to our databases every day at midnight.

The next step after we have defined and implemented the maintenance plan is to monitor that all backups are being executed. In order to reach our goal it will be necessary to know whether a backup has been done or not and that could be possible by monitoring the backup job or querying the msdb database metadata among many other options. For this post we will use the second option, we will query msdb to check databases backup information. The main reason why we choose this option is because of the variability of backup maintenance plan definitions. The backup job is defined by every DBA and we cannot assume that all databases are included in the maintenance plan, on the other hand by querying msdb we will know for sure the databases which have been backed up and those that have not been backed up.