Author: Stuart Moore Page 10 of 18

Microsoft have followed through with the deprecated warning on Test-AzureResource and it’s finally been removed. So there’s now a lot of PowerShell scripts out there that no longer work.

A quick alternative that involves nothing more than a search and replace (at least in my scripts so far!) is Find-AzureRmResource, behaviour is the same returning $FALSE if the Azure resource doesn’t exist and $TRUE if it does. So this snippet:

    if (!(Test-AzureRMResource `
        -ResourceName $vmName `
        -ResourceType "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines" `
        -ResourceGroupName $rgName)) {

can simply be replaced with:

    if (!(find-AzureRMResource `
        -ResourceName $vmName `
        -ResourceType "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines" `
        -ResourceGroupName $rgName)) {

and everything’s good.

Needing to push this (Microsoft KB 911272 around a bunch of web servers in a hurry. Luckily, thanks to 2 good design decisions:

• Enabling PS remoting
• A sane machine naming convention of the form server-1, server-2

We could push the change around with a small bit of Powershell:

$ccred = Get-Credential

$ScriptBlock={
    New-ItemProperty "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET" -Name "FCNMode" -Value 1 -PropertyType "DWord" 
    New-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ASP.NET" -Name "FCNMode" -Value 1 -PropertyType "DWord" 
    iisreset
    }

$i=1
while ($i-lt 9){
    $cname = "app-prod-web-$i"
    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $cname -ScriptBlock $ScriptBlock -Credential $ccred
    $i++
}

We grab some credentials for the remote boxes (remember, seperate accounts for desktop and server admin duties is a GOOD idea).

As we’re passing through multiple commands/lines to Invoke-Command using a scriptblock is the easiest way, so create one of those. Quickly use New-ItemProperty to add the required DWORD values under the right keys, and then an iisreset to make sure they take affect.

A nice quick and dirty while loop allows us to push the scriptblock to the 8 servers in this set, and we’re done. A quick change of the $cname variable and I can push it to the next set as well. And another edit and it’s pushed into the staging environments as well.

There’s a simple way of getting Powershell to tell you the last folder in a known path:

$path = \\server\share\folder1\folder2\folder3
$folder = Split-Path $path -Leaf

and that’s all you need.

Now, how do you go about doing that if you don’t know the path ahead of time? That is, you have a large collection of directories, and all you want are those folders than make up the bottom levels of the branches. In this graphic it would be all the folders underlined.

As an example, current $EMPLOYER holds backups from all SQL databases on a share, with each database’s backups being in a folder. Due to various DBAs over the years the depth of the tree to the actual backups isn’t fixed. So I need to find the “bottom” folder so I can process the backup files in there.

Well, that’s a little trickier. So lets have a look at a couple of ways of doing that:

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