There is a PowerShell Virtual User Group meeting coming up.  If you haven’t checked one out before, Marco Shaw has set up a PowerShell Virtual User Group, which is hosted online via a Live Meeting.  He normally has a couple of speakers who cover various PowerShell related topics.

The next meeting is scheduled for November 13th at 12 PM EST.

Speakers include Nathan Winter (an Exchange MVP), Joel "Jaykul" Bennet, and there will be a representative from Idera to talk about PowerShell Plus Professional.

More information about the meeting can be found here.

Jeffrey Snover just blogged about working around the Add-Member syntax by extending the System.Object type (which all types inherit from) with a script property called PSAddMember(), which allows you to add NoteProperties (the most common addition to objects) more easily ands supports other scenarios too.

Check it out here.

I’ll be providing an introduction to PowerShell at the September LOPSA-Madison meeting (September 11th, at 7:00 PM - room open at 6:30).  If you live in the Milwaukee/Madison, Wisconsin area, come on out.  The LOPSA-Madison chapter has a lot of smart people, interesting discussion, and good networking opportunities.

If you are not in the Southeastern Wisconsin, check out LOPSA.org to see if there is a local chapter in your area.  Get Involved!

(There are some door prizes, provided by the sponsors of PowerShellCommunity.org)

Jeffrey Hicks responded to my comments about his Analyze-Packet PowerShell script and took them as a challenge.  Well, he rose to the challenge and sent me a copy of his re-worked scripts and asked for my opinion (he’s the scripting guru, not me, but hey, I’m always willing to shoot my mouth off).

I really liked the way he modified Analyze-Packet to output an analysis object; but, since he asked for my opinion, I thought I would go through it and see what I might do differently.  The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that there were two sections of nearly identical code for name resolution, which begged to be pulled out into a function.  The only other suggestion I had was adding a switch parameter to turn off the name resolution, which can slow down the processing of the script on a large packet capture, where I’ve run into problems before.  (Actually, I had the switch parameter to turn on name resolution, but in the final product, Jeff changed it to be the reverse.  Good call.)  When I’m using other products (read Wireshark), I turn off name resolution as it removes some of the overhead and the distraction of names.

Nice work Jeff.. Check out his blog post here, as he discusses some of the changes that were needed to get both Get-Packet and Analyze-Packet to this point, as well as having the scripts available for download.

I saw a post on Twitter asking if there are any applications to check to see if there are any Twitterers who were following you, but that you were not following. So I though that this would be a good PowerShell task.The code is available here. 

Now this is COOL!

Joel “Jaykul” Bennet maintains the PowerShell Script Repository, which is also linked to PowerShellCommunity.org.

Now, the script editor in PowerGUI can search the PowerShell Script Repository.

I just tried it and searched for a script to send email.  I searched for mail and found three matches, chose the one I wanted, clicked on it, and it appeared in my script editor.  Nice!

Thanks to Dmitry and Kirk at Quest for this great community resource.

Marco Shaw (of the Get-PowerShell Blog) will be presenting to the UK Users Group about /n Software’s NetCmdlets. 

Check it out, as /n Software has a number of cool cmdlets for working with network protocols and has a product under development for tunneling PowerShell over SSH.

Details of the presentation are here.

I talked about it a bit when we recorded Episode 55 (soon to be released), but the Sysadmin Meme has really taken off. Admins and scripters from all areas are responding and calling out their associates… I’ll update this as I see come across more.

In no particular order:

1. Shay Levy
2. Hal Rottenberg
3. Marc van Orsouw
4. Richard Siddaway
5. Rolf Masuch
6. Andy Schneider
7. Jacob Saaby Nielsen
8. Paul Muller
9. Jonathan Noble
10. James O’Neill
11. Kirk Munro
12. Jeff Hicks
13. Rick Savoia
14. Darren Mar-Elia
15. David Moisan
16. Paul Sylvester
17. Joel Bennet (Jaykul) - taking it back on the dev track
18. Oisin  Grehan
19. Joe Richards
20. Brandon Shell
21. Don Jones
22. Greg Shields

Thanks again to everyone for sharing their stories!

OK, here it goes.

How old were you when you started using computers?

I was around 12 or 13 when I started playing with computers. I saw them in Popular Science and was fascinated with them. I then pestered my parents for my first PC for Christmas and my dad finally took me to K-Mart where I had to choose between the Texas Instruments TI/99-4A, the Timex Sinclair 1000, and either the Commodore Vic-20 or C-64.

What was your first machine?

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I remember my friend getting a Commodore and being jealous of the color graphics. My second and real springboard PC was a Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80 Model 4 with 64 kb RAM and dual 5.25 floppy drives (360k each!) We had Tandy TRS-80 Model II and 3’s in my school district so I went with what I knew. My dad had IBM PC’s at work and showed me an ad for an IBM (Peanut, I think) and I decided to stick to the Radio Shack brand. I still have both of these units somewhere in my parents attic….along with all the other old stuff I’ve talked about on the show. My first x86 PC was a Bondwell B210 286 laptop with a 40 MB hard drive.

What was the first real script you wrote?

Hello World loop in Basic on the Timex Sinclair 1000……Isn’t that what everyone writes? I went on to write an inventory control system in BASIC for the company my dad worked for. I coded on the TRS-80 and then printed it out. A typist transcribed my code onto an IBM PC and then I came in to troubleshoot the problems. No reading floppies cross-platform in those days. There were subtle differences in the BASIC compilers back than for disk I/O and file handling. Sadly, this old geek can still remember that BASIC stood for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

What scripting languages have you used?

Basic (No, not visual), Pascal, COBOL, and Fortran. Pascal will always be my favorite. Top down design rocks. If you haven’t declared it….you can’t freakin’ call it. That’s probably why I’ve had so much trouble grasping the object-oriented languages. Later on into today, it’s been DOS batch file scripts, SQL, Kixtart, and the occasional dabble into PowerShell.

What was your first professional sysadmin gig?I took a part-time job in 1987 doing data entry for free magazine subscriptions (International Computer Network) while going to community college for Comp Sci. When they found I had a tech bent, they started using me to do after-hours system tasks on the two mainframes we had (Tandem System I and Tandem System II). Load tapes for backups, load printers for labels or other print jobs, etc. The one thing I remember is the wide carriage printers in the data center. Before each type of print job, I had to run a paper tape with a series of holes punched in it through a reader on the printer. This would set up the printer for the type of job to be printed.

If you knew then what you know now, would have started in IT?

Definitely. During my college years, after I gave up on programming as a major, I focused on being in the financial markets. After a couple of years, however, things changed and I took on MIS as a second major and veered back towards IT. Mostly the change was in the industry. I wasn’t cut out to be a programmer locked in a hermetically sealed mainframe room, but that was the only college curriculum at that time. Once MIS and broader IS/IT curriculums came around it fit me better.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new sysadmins, what would it be?

Everybody knows something you don’t. Talking to them and asking them is the only way to find out what it is. In return, share everything you know. Nothing is more counterproductive than having knowledge and not sharing it.

If I could add a second item, it would be; Nobody knows everything. If you think you do, it is time to get out of this field. You need to enjoy constantly learning new things because this is an ever changing field.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had scripting?

I guess the scripts I am most proud of are the ones I did for Y2K at my old job. They had these old scripts using this Novell Netware add-on pack that allowed them to transfer files between a Novell NetWare server and a SCO Unix server. The Add-on pack was not Y2K compliant, so I replicated the scripts using FTP and DOS batch files. There are only one or two facilities still using these scripts, but thy are still there 10 years later.

Who am I calling out?

Paul Rj Muller at the Caffination Podcast

Justo Morales at the Pepe Show Podcast

Rick Savoia of the The Force Field Podcast

UPDATE: Paul and Rick have both responded. I’ll have to reach out to Justo and kick him in the asterisk. You can find Paul and Rick’s responses at the following links:

Paul’s Response

Rick’s Response