Getting Started with foreScript

Getting Started with foreScript

I have been using Powershell for some time now and I think that it is a great addition to the toolset of an IT Professional. However the more I used Powershell, the more I found myself having  to write the same pieces of code over and over again in my scripts. Those pieces of code had to do with:

• Getting a list of computers to run the script against - You know the drill and that meant using a cmdlet to get a list of computers from either a csv file, or a text file, or the command line.

•  Getting the information for user authentication - If I wanted to run the script as another user I would end up either prompting for the required credentials, or elevating privileges at run time, or even running Powershell as an administrator.

• Formatting the output of the Powershell scripts for display purposes - This speaks for itself. I have written quite a few Powershell scripts that have code that is only used for converting the  output  into html.

I could have written a module that would handle all of those issues for me and use that module in every Powershell script that I wrote. However I wanted to do much more than that. I wanted to  create a framework that would support the execution of Powershell scripts.

BSOD REGISTRY ERROR 51

BSOD REGISTRY ERROR 51

It wasn't the way that I expected to spend my day, but things don't always turn out the way that you expect. I had just received a call that one of our production Terminal Servers was rebooting, and to make matters worse it was the server that could handle the majority of our workload. I logged unto the server and as I went  through the System Event log I saw the message:

"The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x00000051 (0x00000004, 0x00000001, 0xe7079d70, 0x00000238). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP."

Automation Nightmare - Updating Excel Spreadsheet from Powershell

Automation Nightmare - Updating  Excel Spreadsheet from Powershell

The assignment was very simple. All I had to do was to login into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), run a query ,  copy and paste the results of the query into an Excel Spreadsheet Template and then save that template using an agreed naming convention. The only problem was that I had to run the query with different parameters and that would mean doing it nearly one hundred times.

So I dutifully began my task and after a few hours I had only extracted the data for about three of the scenarios. The way that I was going about doing the extract would take forever and a day and I did not have that much time.

They say that "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" and so I decided to use my Powershell hammer to nail my data extraction problem, so to speak. As far as I was concerned Powershell was the ideal tool for the job. I could use Powershell to run the queries against the SQL Server database and return the data in a dataset. Once I created the dataset I would then  loop through the data and update each worksheet in the Excel Spreadsheet Template  and then save the spreadsheet in the agreed naming convention.  Life could not be easier.