A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
Listen: 
In This Episode
Today on the PowerScripting Podcast we have MVP Systems in the house to talk about JAMS. And we have a TON of news from PDC to report!
News
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- Wow! Were do we start? How about 574 cmdlets
- Rumor: IBM will be providing cmdlets for hardware management
- Powershell will be installed by default on Windows Server 2008 R2 and W7
- TechEd Barcelona is coming up next week and several MVPs will be there
Interview
JAMS
- meson : ## What is the cost of the product or what is the customer base small/middle/enterprise/etc?
- http://www.mvpsi.com
- glnsize : ##are these task’s or is there an agent
- trac3r726 : ## Any Reporting with charts for Management?
- glnsize : ## soon to be psremoting/wsman?
- ## any way to send jobs to run on server core, perhaps for speed/reliability?
SAAS
- rfoust : ## how does saasmonitor scale?
- rfoust : ## can it integrate w/ existing monitoring for a central dashboard?
- rfoust : ## can you do user-experience monitoring, like adding a jmeter script or something?
Resources
- 10 Cool Things to do with the Powershell (12 min video) - This demo shows some of the neat things you can do with PowerShell with regards to server administration. There are 10 demos you can run through ranging from simple queries for services to enumerating information in Active Directory. Some of the scripts use lists of computers, some prompt for a computername. Each script shows a different thing you can do with PowerShell to quickly create administration scripts.
- Precision Computing – Introduction to PowerShell Presentation
- PowerShell Code Repository – Compare-AD - A set of functions (and sample code using them) to create snapshots of user accounts in the current Active Directory domain save them in an xml file, and then compare live AD environment against that XML
- VMware: VI Toolkit (for Windows): Not Another Suite of Scripts!
- PoshRSS - is a web application for creating RSS feeds from PowerShell. The output of any PowerShell command/script is displayed as an RSS feed. The primary goal of PoshRSS is to provide system administrations the ability to leverage PowerShell + RSS to aggregate system information across many systems.
Challenge
Don’t forget our challenge from last week. If you submit a solution, we’ll feature it on the show and the website, and you’ll get a little something for your trouble. :) Here is the email from Dale which we forgot to put in last week’s show notes:
“While trying to find a solution to a problem that popped up at work, I stumbled upon an open-source dotnet object-oriented database called Db4o. It is intended to be used as an embedded database in programs where some persistent storage is needed, but instead of storing data in related tables, it stores objects.
I’ve tried to access the functions via reflection, but I am just learning Powershell and I don’t know if this is the right technique. I haven’t gotten very far.
I was wondering if you or someone else who listens to the show could take a look at it, and see if it can be useful as an object store in powershell scripts.”
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE! 
As a follow up to your discussion of PoshRSS, using RSS for system administration is a novel but extremely useful technique to consolidate information across many servers. I’m using RSS Server software and along with my favorite client-side aggregator, to pull together:
Databases missing backups
SQL Replication Issues including down or latency problems
SQL Error Log for Error Messages
Open Microsoft Operation Manager Alerts
Open Help desk tickets
Drives with less than 20% free space
Uptime
RSS for system administration is a better solution than building scripts which generate yet another report. There are several problems with report and email based approach. The report information is static only reflecting data at the time report was generated. RSS Server software like PoshRSS present real-time information when you hit the RSS feed link the Powershell script/command executes. Each report you create you need to collect the data, possibly store, format and deliver usually via email. One of the great things about RSS is the collection, format and delivery are handled for you. RSS is versatile you can consume the data in a number of ways including via an aggregator, Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharePoint. You can even convert RSS to email if you really wanted to. Each report or email requires that you open the report and view it, which is just as inefficient as viewing a website instead of subscribing to a RSS feed of a website when all you care about is new information.
Not only can you monitor systems with RSS and you can also consolidate information from other monitoring systems. I have two help desk systems and Microsoft Operations Manager Alerts to monitor. I’ve setup 3 RSS feeds which check for “new” information every one minute. This provides a single portal, my RSS aggregator, to view instead of having to log into 3 systems.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the RSS feeds I create are all by based on exception conditions so the volume of data is not overwhelming. In addition the frequency which the data is updated is controlled by the client-side aggregator. For some things like help desk tickets, I’ll check for new information every minute. For things like backup information once every 24 hours is sufficient.
Here’s a link to a short presentation I gave for more information about using RSS for system administration:
If you’re used to subscribing to bunch of blogs with an RSS aggregator, you’ll probably find applying the same RSS concept to system administration data collection as you do for blogs to be just as addicting and time saving
[...] recommend that you check the podcast (the db4o challenge part is right in the end).This is what the hosts say about the challenge in the Episode 47 page:”Don’t forget our challenge from last week. If you submit a solution, [...]
Using RSS for System Administration is a novel but extremely useful technique to consolidate information across many servers. I’m using RSS Server software PoshRSS and xSQLSoftware RSS Reporter along with my favorite client-side aggregator, RSSOwl to pull together [...]