Sorry folks.  Life is once again getting in the way of our live stream.  Last week’s show will be posted soon and we should be back on track next week.

Thanks!

Recorded: March 24, 2010
Your Host: Steve Murawski and Rich Niemeier
Show Length: 53:05

Before you acquire power, you must acquire knowledge – and Quest Software has what you need! In Jeffery Hicks’ e-book, “Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell,” learn how PowerShell helps you master local accounts and groups, password management, security and permissions and much, much more. You’ll also learn about the PowerShell extras and out-of-the-box features that will help you control Active Directory.

Don’t wait – register for your free copy of Jeffery’s book, and see why PowerShell and Quest Power GUI are the ultimate Windows management tools.

Topics/Links:

• Facebook, will they ever charge me, please?
• Web Platform Installer
• Microsoft SharedView
• SQLPSX - V2.2 Coming Up
• Edit LMHosts so you can manually define the domain server
• Port Reporter (see what’s using your machine’s network card)
• Are AT&T and Time Warner good to be used as separate ISP’s for redundancy?

Read the full show notes here.

Website Picks

• http://giveupinternet.com/ - blogs about humorous tech and internet topics

Download Here

Mea Culpa – We were getting ready to record and my desktop started acting funny.  I couldn’t get any application to not hang. 

Since that machine is how I’m set up to record and Keith was unavailable tonight, that left Rich as the sole voice in the wilderness.  Since none of us are any good on our own, we won’t be able to put on our usual great content, witty banter, and comic brilliance.

I’ll be rebuilding my desktop this weekend and stay tuned and be ready to rock and roll next week!

Thanks!

Life intervenes yet again, so we will not have a live stream tonight on Ustream.

In the meantime, pop over to Keith Combs blog and weigh in on where the TechNet forums should go.  I think the day of the forum has passed and sites like StackOverflow, ServerFault, Concentrated Tech, and other QA sites are the next iteration.  Should MS detour away from the forums and spend the time and money on other content?  Keith Combs is asking - give him your opinion.

 Talk with you next week!

Previously, I’ve been in control of the environment that I have been monitoring, so I was able to integrate that performance monitoring into PolyMon.  Now that I have a slightly different scenario, I’ve had to modify my performance monitoring strategy.

I’ve mainly been concerned about general server performance, as well as IIS and SQL performance (Basic, IIS, SQL 2005, IIS and SQL 2005), so I’ve been using counter sets that mirror that.

Then I wrapped a couple of calls to logman.exe, which is the command line interface to PerfMon counters.

To create the counter, I used

logman create counter BlackBox -v mmddhhmm -cf Counters.txt -si 00:10 -f bincirc -o “c:\Perflogs\Blackbox_%computername%” -max 250

which creates a counter named “BlackBox” (like a flight recorder).

The command also:

• reads in the counters from a text file (see my examples above). 
• sets the sample interval to be every 10 minutes (“-si”).
• sets the log file is a binary circular file (set by the ‘”-f”), which would be a maximum of 250 MB (set by “–max”)
• sets the log file location and name (using the computer name environmental variable to append the computer name to the log file) and the “-v” option also adds the month, day, hour, and minute of the start of the log to the file name.

After creating the counter, I used

to start the capture of the counter information.

Finally, I have another command to stop the capture, so when there is an issue or after a specified period of monitoring, I can grab the log file and feed it to PAL or load it in PerfMon (on Server 2008 or greater – as PerfMon got some nice feature bumps with the more recent releases) and analyze it there or export it to a CSV file to slice into it with Excel.

Have Fun!

Resources:

Runas Radio Shows -

• Stephen Choy
• Shane Creamer
• Clint Huffman

Technet Article – Taking Your Server’s Pulse

PAL – Performance Analysis Of Logs

I’m currently running Server 2008 R2 (from a VHD) as one of the OSes on my work laptop.  Thanks to the http://www.win2008workstation.com/ site, I was able to get my wireless card working.  

Problem - When I went to create a virtual network in Hyper-V, the wireless network interface was not an option.

Solution - I created a loopback adapter and bridged it to my wireless network card.  I was able to create a virtual network that included the bridged connection and my VMs were able to access my wireless network.

Larry Clarkin asked me back on the Thirsty Developer to continue talking about development and PowerShell.  We talked about creating cmdlets, hosting PowerShell, and a bit about Version 2.  Check it out here.

Once again, life is intruding on our podcasting schedule.  There will be a short show released this week with an interview I did at TechEd with Jeremy Moskowicz. We’ll be back to our regular live stream and show next week. 

Occasionally life gets in the way and today is one of those times.  We won’t have the live stream tonight, but we will be back in full form next week!

See you then!

Twitter is an interesting ecosystem.  Tweets on every topic under the sun (and some that aren’t) are flying by at an ever increasing speed. 

Some people in various groups of interest have tried to reign in some of the chaos by coming up with lists of people interested in various topics (like my PowerShell Twitterers list).

The problem with these types of lists is that they require some work to maintain and can quickly become outdated.  Here’s where TweeterTags comes in to play.

TweeterTags.com is a site that allows you to tag Twitter account with your areas of interest.  By tagging yourself, you make it easier to find other like-minded people and make it easier for others with the same interest to find you.

TweeterTags exposes a RESTful api, and Jeff Hicks quickly wrote a script (Get-TweeterTaggedUser) to take advantage of it.

Thanks to Jonathan Noble and his associates for this innovative site!

I’ve tagged myself, how about you?