PowerShell

So I’ve been using dbatools for automated restore tasks and came across a SQL Server Agent job that I wrote that was reporting success but the job was actually failing.

What I found was the function I used, Restore-DbaDatabase, was not able to access the path that I was trying to restore databases from. The Restore-DbaDatabase function, and all dbatools functions according to the dbatools team on Slack, will throw a Warning rather than an Error by design.

In our previous post we discussed how to implement OpenSSH (the plumbing) as the transport layer for PowerShell remoting. In this post, we’re going to leverage that configuration and look at some common remoting use cases. This is one of the core things I use everyday when I work with PowerShell. Remoting gives me the ability to administer scale up and administer large collections of systems. So like I said in my very first post about my PowerShell journey, it’s become a part of my every day life and techniques like this are at the core of how I use PowerShell. So let’s get started…

So in my last post I told you about how I started my journey on learning PowerShell, let’s keep going down that path together. In this post I’m going to introduce PowerShell Remoting in Multi-Platform Environments, specifically using OpenSSH. We’ll discuss WinRM in multi-platform systems in an upcoming post.

Have you ever had to execute a command against one system or a collection of systems? Have you ever wanted a remote shell on a Windows system? Using Remoting you can you can do all of these things, very, very easily.

Why do I use PowerShell?

Well, here’s a little back story…last year I was involved in a Pluralsight Play by Play with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover for launch of Open PowerShell on Linux and Mac. Before this video, I didn’t take PowerShell seriously. Basically, if I Google’d a problem and found a solution in PowerShell I would grind my teeth and copy and paste the text into the foreign blue console and cross my fingers.

Speaking at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017!

  I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017 on the conference runs from April 9th 2017 through April 12th 2017. This is an incredible event packed with fantastic content and speakers. <a href="https://eventloom.com/event/home/summit2017">Check out the amazing schedule</a>!

  This year I have two sessions!

  On **Tuesday, April 10th at 10:00AM** – My session is with none other the <a href="https://twitter.com/theJasonHelmick/">Jason Helmick</a>. Our session is “**Cross platform Management – Windows/Linux**”

  Here’s the abstract

<blockquote>

    Let Jason Helmick and Anthony Nocentino take you through a fun filled, demo heavy adventure of how Windows and Linux admins can work together managing a heterogeneous environment. You will learn all you need to know from both sides of the aisle to get started!

</blockquote>

  On **Wednesday, April 11th at 10:00AM** – I’m presenting solo on “**Linux Fundamentals for the PowerShell Expert**”

  Here’s the abtract

<blockquote>

    PowerShell is now available on Linux and your management wants you to leverage this shift in technology to more effectively manage your systems, but you’re a Windows guy! Don’t fear, iIt’s just an operating system! It has all the same components Windows has and in this session we’ll show you that.

    We will look at the Linux operating system architecture and show you how to interact with and manage Linux system! By the end of this session you’ll be ready to go back to the office and get started working with Linux In this session we’ll cover the following – Process control – Service control – Package installation – Configuration management – System resource management (CPU, disk and memory) – Using PowerShell to interact with Linux systems

</blockquote>

  <a href="https://eventloom.com/event/home/summit2017"><img loading="lazy" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.png" src="/images/2017/03/NewImage.png" alt="PowerShell Summit" width="315" height="65" border="0" /></a>

OK, so if you haven’t heard of the dbatools.io project run by Chrissy LeMaire and company…you’ve likely been living under a rock. I strongly encourage you to check it out ASAP. What they’re doing will make your life as a DBA easier…immediately. Here’s an example…

One of the things I like to do as a DBA is backup my databases, restore them to another server and run CHECKDB on them. There are some cmdlets in the dbatools project, in particular the Snowball release, that really make this easy. In this post I’m going to outline a quick solution I had to throw together this week to help me achieve this goal. We’ve all likely written code to do this using any number of technologies and techniques…wait until you see how easy it is using the dbatools project.

Where – Thursday, May 18, 2017

Where – TUGA IT – Lisbon, Portugal

Full Day Session – “Open Source PowerShell on Linux – Skills to Manage Your Heterogenous Data Center“ 

Registration Link – https://app.weventual.com/detalheEvento.action?iDEvento=4011

• Early Bird Price – before 03/18/2017 – 150€
• Normal Price – before 05/01/2017 – 200€
• Late Registration – 05/18/2017 – 250€

PowerShell is now available on Linux and Mac and you want to use it to manage your multi-platform data center. In this workshop we will introduce Open Source PowerShell and learn why this is such a groundbreaking technology shift. Then we’ll get into the essentials of using PowerShell on Linux and Mac, we’ll start with installing Powershell and building PowerShell from source, work our way into using cmdlets and bash integration, building pipelines, remoting scenarios with heterogenous operating systems and discuss Desired State Configuration.

This month I’ll be speaking to the PowerShell Virtual Chapter of PASS. The session is on Linux OS Fundamentals for the SQL Admin. At the core of the session we will introduce you to OS concepts like managing files and file systems, installation packages, using PowerShell on Linux, managing system services, commands and processes and system resource management. This session is intended for those who have never seen or have very little exposure to Linux but are seasoned Windows or SQL administrators. Things like processes, memory utilization and writing scripts should be familiar to you but are not required.

Open Source PowerShell is available on several operating systems, that really what’s special about the whole project! To get PowerShell to function on these various systems we need to build (compile) the software in that environment. This is what will produce the actual executable program that is powershell.

To facilitate the build process the PowerShell team has documented how to do this for the currently available platforms, Linux, MacOS and Windows. In this post I want to talk about why this is important, point you to the resources available online to help you build Open Source PowerShell and tell you my experiences building PowerShell on the Windows, macOS and Linux!

Open Source PowerShell has been on fire, getting tons of community support and really making people think about what’s to come with a single language to manage a heterogenous data center.

To highlight this point, in my recent Pluralsight Play By Play Microsoft Open Source PowerShell on Linux and Mac with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover I did a demo on using PowerShell remoting where I connected from a Linux machine to three other machines and retrieved lists of top processes from each…two Linux and one Windows. I used one script to accomplish this and no passwords. A simple implementation highlighting a very big idea. After, some people have asked…how did I do this without passwords?