Bartek is a busy IT Admin working for an international company, Optiver. He loves PowerShell and automation. That love got him the honors of a Microsoft MVP. He shares his knowledge on his blog. You can also find him on Twitter: @bielawb.
Bartek BielawskiInitial release of PowerShell DSC for Linux had one big gap: it supported only pushing the configuration to the node. And even though this mode is good enough for demos or basic proof of concept, it doesn’t seem like a proper solution for production environment.
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Bartek BielawskiNew version of PowerShell DSC for Linux doubled the number of resources available. Initial batch in CTP covered basics: nxUser to create and manage users, nxGroup to define groups and manage group members, nxFile to create and modify files, nxService to start, stop, enable, and disable daemons, and nxScript to cover anything that couldn’t be done with other resources.
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Bartek BielawskiFirst version of PowerShell DSC for Linux is released. We announced that and promised to come back to that subject. It’s time to fulfil that promise.
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Bartek BielawskiThe day that people who love both PowerShell DSC and xplat solutions where looking for had finally arrived. Last week the first version of PowerShell DSC for Linux was released.
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Bartek BielawskiWhen you install OMI for the first time, a pair of keys is generated for you. When an automated process is used, the only option that will “just work” is to generate self-signed certificate.
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Bartek BielawskiManaging Linux can become a challenge if you don’t have some way of distributing credentials. There are several options: joining Active Directory domain and using shared credentials for both Linux and Windows, using other LDAP implementation to authenticate or distribute users/groups using Configuration Management tools.
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Bartek BielawskiCTP of Linux DSC that was released last year has only five resources: nxService, nxFile, nxUser, nxGroup, and nxScript. Things like package management, network configuration, firewall settings, jobs scheduled in crontab don’t have coverage in resources.
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Bartek BielawskiLinux is a system that stores configuration in text files. As a result, nxFile should be considered one of two most powerful resources offered in the CTP release.
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Bartek BielawskiPowerShell DSC for Linux caught my attention immediately after it was announced. Being able to control configuration of Linux box with pure PowerShell code is huge for anybody who is interested in cross-platform solutions build in PowerShell.
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Bartek BielawskiIn the first part of this series, we covered the basis–how to get Desired State Configuration to do what the name promises: keep desired state consistent.
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Bartek BielawskiOne of PowerShell strengths has always been string manipulation. PowerShell has very good support for regular expressions–using both cmdlets and operators.
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Bartek BielawskiOne of the first tasks I used PowerShell for was related to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). I had heard about WMI before I started my adventure with PowerShell, but never tried it myself.
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Bartek BielawskiOnce upon a time I answered Stack Overflow question about easy way to replace ‘special’ characters with something ‘web safe’. I answered question with the following code:
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or later. In the final part of the series, we will combine everything we’ve found out so far and create a tool that will identify any command that needs to be wrapped by advanced function in order to make access to verbose and debug messages easy and natural.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or later. PowerShell commands, both advanced and simple, can work with the pipeline. The difference is that in the simple commands access to pipeline is implicit with $_ automatic variable.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or later. In the first two tips of this series we focused on the problem.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or later. In the first part of this series, we identified the problem–commands (scripts or functions) that ‘partially’ support verbose and debug messages.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or later. One of the PowerShell features that makes writing scripts and functions easier is ability to produce different types of output.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or later. Filtering information retrieved from SQL database should not be limited to text filters only.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or later. Whenever we retrieve information from SQL database we are faced with the problem: are we happy with column names defined in database schema?
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or later. Adding support for easy filtering on individual table columns is great, but the fact that user would have to use SQL wildcard syntax rather than wildcards that he is used to, makes it feel like a partial solution.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or later. This is the first tip in a series of SQL filtering tips.
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or later. PowerShell is designed to operate on objects. But, what can we do if all we have is text e.
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Bartek BielawskiWhen we analyze XML documents with XPath we may need information about number of certain items. For example, we can have an XHTML document with several tables and we can easily check which tables contain rows with ‘class’ attribute:
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Bartek BielawskiXPath has one big disadvantage–it’s case sensitive. Unlike regular expressions, there is no way to “turn it off”. But there is a way around it.
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Bartek BielawskiFiltering using XPath is not limited to queries that make sure that existing value is equal to value that we are interested in.
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Bartek BielawskiFiltering data with XPath works very well even if we need more complex filters that require information from different levels in the XML document.
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Bartek BielawskiXPath can be used to apply ‘filter left’ philosophy to XML documents. For example we can find any h1 element with ‘title’ id using the following syntax:
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Bartek BielawskiThis is the first tip in a series of Select-Xml/XPath tips. Working with XML documents in PowerShell is relatively easy. For most things it is enough to read XML file and convert it to XmlDocument object using XML type accelerator:
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. PowerShell has a very nice list of built-in parameter validation attributes. They help validating parameter values before any code runs and give end-user consistent pre-configured error messages:
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Bartek BielawskiNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. In PowerShell 3.0 validation attributes work for regular variables in the same way they worked previously for parameters.
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Bartek BielawskiI’m kind of guy who loves tiny little tricks. Tricks in PowerShell are almost like Easter eggs in the games of old times, very rewarding when you find them – but in PowerShell besides pure joy of being able to find something cool, you can move it to the next level, add it to your tool belt and use it every single day.
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Bartek BielawskiI guess when you use PowerShell; you very often don’t care how it works. As long as it does what you asked it to do – you are happy.
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