Research Triangle PowerShell Users Group User Group, 24 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Remote information gathering in PowerShell with David Steimle

Description

Gathering information from remote computers is common task for system administrators. This discussion highlights how to gather data remotely using PowerShell. Our speaker, David Stiemle is a packaging and deployment expert for the USPS. He shares his tips for pulling information from large sets of computers and the challenges involved in doing that as efficiently as possible.

David also offers tips on how he handles different situations that can be challenging and repeated requests for data. Join us for an eye opening look into how admins in big environments perform their daily workloads from the command line.

A

And good evening, welcome to the research triangle. Powershell user group today is july, 15th and hope you got your taxes in. uh We want to say thank you to david steimle for deciding to join and share with us some great information that he's developed over his course of action in his I.t career and I'm looking forward to it so david. Take it away.

B

Okay, thank you very much um all right, uh remote information gathering with powershell. This is uh just something I kind of do on the regular. um I am with the enterprise packaging team for the united states postal service here in raleigh.

B

I started learning powershell about six years ago, thanks to a member of this team who I or this group who I didn't know was a member of this group. If he was started really working with powershell about three years ago, uh where it kind of became my job focus.

B

um I've been with this group, maybe two years, not sure, I'm an sccm packager. I specialize in custom script installations and detection methods, although now I'm a little more managerial I play with linux, I got three raspberry pi's. My wife would love it. If you wanted to take some away from me and I'm a dungeon crawl classic for a crew judge, I have an annoying cat all right um I'll leave that up for a second easiest way to find me is twitter. I have my link to my webpage on there. That's just the qr code.

B

B

All right, uh yeah, I'm just t.b steinle on twitter davidsteinley.net, my discord's right there and the github for what I'm talking about some of it's out of date, but uh this is kind of what I'm talking about uh kind of an older version of this so anyway, why do we care about remote data?

B

You might not, but you might someday, so it's kind of kind of cool to know about how to get it. You might need to get information from machines that you access or support, or maybe you just maybe you find yourself in a position where you need to get a hold of somebody else's information in a non-malicious way.

B

Someone in your enterprise right and the best part is, if you know how to get information remotely. You can get that programmatically from a lot.

C

B

And, of course, bosses love data.

B

uh All right, the the two main tools are going to be we're going to be talking about script blocks.

B

You write, script blocks all the time, even if you don't know it, script blocks just code in between brackets.

B

I like script blocks because they can make my code look a little cleaner. I can write a script block and then use our next command invoke command to kick that code off.

B

It's especially good with when you're doing remote information cat you gotta go, but it's helpful in general coding, so script blocks are kind of dumb functions. If you will for now, I'm going fast, I think, but anyway, I'm sorry.

A

You're doing great you're doing great all right.

B

um Invoke command is what makes your script blocks happen um and that's the mechanism for running your code remotely quick disclaimer, I'm using a lot of wmi examples, mostly because anybody here is using windows, can make a wmi call that I'm making and probably get the same results as I do. um Wbm is not the best thing, uh but if we start talking about sim instance, then we're talking about getting into remotes a whole different way.

B

So I avoided that I'm primarily using powershell 5.1, because windows or powershell 7, of course, does not have wmi at least out of my linux boxes. I use it on. I don't have one rm environment, so I'm going to be doing everything locally, but you could include anytime, you see invoke command, you could put dash computer name, computer name, and it would run the same way.

B

Last thing is my self-deprecating disclaimer, uh I'm not a master of anything. These are just fun little tricks. All of these can be improved upon.

B

Let's start slow, just plain old invoke command in case you're, not familiar.

B

See how slow my machine is. I almost bought a laptop for this presentation.

B

All the way up, all right.

B

So just plain old invoke: command script block we're going to get the.

A

We don't see that part, we still see the presentation.

B

Oh crap, um sorry.

A

Maybe you shared just the app, not the screen.

A

Yeah, it looks like you just the app.

B

My bad, I should have.

A

The cheat is just stop sharing and then re-share the.

A

B

I do with my day and I still don't get it right. um I share.

A

Don't worry, we'll get kevin to cut this part out, so all right.

B

All right, how's, that are you seeing my whole screen now yep all right, taskbar there we go.

B

So vs code and screen over here with a lot of spoilers on it, so invoke command def script block. You can run a little bit of code, we're just going to get the last boot time for my machine right.

B

So I rebooted yesterday at 541, didn't help any I'm still slow. um If I had rights to your computer, I could do the same command. Invoke command, dash computer name, your computer script block. I could get your last boot time, um that's cool, but I'm probably going to stop using my powerpoint. um The real power is is when you start variablizing the stuff.

B

So if I assign the results, the last boot time to a variable, lots of us know this. Now we essentially echoed wmi out. We got the same thing and what we can do now, of course, is play with that date. Make it more usable you put that date into you, get 20 of those dates. You can't sort them that's a sortable date. You can format normally like this one your year month, month, day day.

B

Those are good dates, much better than day of the week. You know this is the default.

B

So similarly, you can make your script block variable.

B

If I do that, then.

B

Basically, the same thing you're seeing over here, it's just not in brackets and then last bit time can execute that.

B

Good result: there we go so let's go back and skip skip ahead. A few I think, yeah all right. um So that's that's fun, but how useful is it? um What what we kind of want to do is if we're going to a machine, let's get a few things from it.

B

So these are just a bunch of wmi queries. Called this script block one.

B

And then we're going to call our invoke command variable myquery1.

B

B

So my query- one's kind of nice gives us our serial number manufacturer, a bunch of stuff about the system, um things that we might want to know.

A

So can I stop you there? I just want to make sure that everybody here understands what is happening here is basically you're you're executing this code on the actual remote computer. So even if you pass this right now, you're just doing invoke command on your local computer, but you just took a whole bunch of chuckle code and you're doing all that processing on the remote computer.

A

And so, if you did computer name here, you would do it on a remote computer and so you'd have the ability to do this across multiple computers, in sequence, in series, as you as your feet, and you get back these objects and also, I think, one of the things that I think you mentioned you probably will later is that when you do it on a remote computer, you're going to get back a ps computer, a new uh property to that object. When it comes back with a ps computer name,.

B

uh Yes, yeah, um and I may have forgotten that that part, um because I I've been trying to my only enterprise- is my enterprise and I didn't want to share too much uh information about our system. So.

B

Hey um a fun little trick, uh you'll notice this uh the system family equals no. um So it's just, I skipped a whole bunch of stuff all right, so object, one in our script. Block I'm going way too fast object. One is, is an object, we're making ourselves.

B

uh It starts out as a blank object, we're gonna pipe that through select object and we're gonna, give it the names of the objects we want, so we're creating our own object. Select object gives us an empty.

B

Object there so that that's empty, uh then we start filling it in. We start giving serial number the results of this wmi object call and then at the end we return object.

B

One sorry very nervous, um so you notice that that I said uh system family to know system family is not a real property at all in wmi, so what we are doing is a little trick from the guy. I stole this code from.

B

He had a lookup table that I decided to make into a rest api, so chassis type. We got the number back so on my github. I've got a.

B

Json file that has his lookup table. This is all homework. I'm not going to go into it too much just showing it to you, but I'm going to get.

B

My query system family equals chassis where index equals. What my type.

B

Was I see that I'm a notebook anyway? That's just the sidebar.

A

That's actually cool. I had never thought about using uh github just to in that way, anyway, pretty pretty pretty neat man.

B

Thank you um all right, uh I'll see.

A

But I think I like the idea- and you said just using github, but even the idea of just reaching out to an external source for some other library, so even just grab that you know, if you don't need to reach out to github, you could also reach out to you know some file share or something to get that data.

B

Yes- and I I do use uh invoke rest method against shares, sometimes and works just as well.

B

It works a little nicer than get content, json file convert from json, sometimes it's a little cleaner, plus, it's a few steps easier and- and I will mention while I'm here before I skip over it again, um you notice I'm doing that outside of the script block, because, if we're, if we're talking about running the script block against, say a hundred a thousand machines, um whoever owns this uh this json file, whoever owns that server, am I still talking yeah, you're, doing good. Okay, sorry, my mic just went crazy.

B

um Whoever owns that server, they might not like us beating on them a thousand times just to get the same data that we only needed to get once so I'm doing that outside of my script block, so I'm doing it outside of my query, essentially um in a more real sense, this call probably would have been up here somewhere um instead of at the end.

B

I just decided to throw it in at the last minute, as does my normal one.

B

So that's a pretty good script block, but one of the problems is that we are getting.

B

We're getting what seven one two three four five, six we're getting seven items: one call is from an api, but uh so six items we're making six uh wmi calls, but we're only calling five classes so we're making one call twice at least and then in this situation- that's not so bad. But if, if we are talking about a bunch of machines returning a lot of data, then why make that call twice?

B

um That's that costs you little something between processing, power or just time um the fewer calls you can make the better. Ultimately, um let's let's say it takes two seconds to query one machine and you're acquiring a thousand machines. um That's that's a long time right, so um script block two is a little more advanced this time. We're going to get everything from those wmi objects, we're just going to spit it all back out and give it to us. In my query,.

B

So my query to.

B

It's not as pretty it's got more information.

B

The problem problem is it's: it's a little less useful. You see, we've got name, we've got name, we've got name name. If I do my query dot name, I get five responses. I don't have a lot of context. That's not a that's! Not a great thing for us.

B

So, let's get to my jokey part of my slideshow real, quick.

B

B

B

Well, there's the bid on getting that what's wrong with script block one. We talked about this getting six items from five sources.

B

um My query, 2 is not great because it's giving us a bunch of stuff that we don't have any context for uh here's a scenario: urgent email from your boss and I have typo steinle. We need you to scan the field for these items. Why are you still reading this? Go.

B

So these things that he's looking for she's looking for serial number manufacturer, uuid baseboard product those.

C

B

All things that were in our first script, block simple: let's go get them right.

B

So if you, uh you run your script block against the field, you go to lunch, you compile the data, you send it to them. I'm done! Let's go home! Another email, you didn't put the bios version in there, so get me that all right, real, quick none of my current former bosses. Recently former bosses, talk to me this way in case they're. Listening all right, so we have script block 2, but that one's kind of ugly I'll have to get the data and then I'll have to figure out how to present it properly.

B

So what do I need to do?

B

We need to build a better script block, so we're going to do script, lock, 3, which is making a better object, come back to us we're going to get all the data that we can and then we're going to get a little more data to make it easier for us we're going to put computer name at the top level, because that's a key point of data we're going to get last reboot.

B

Since we know how to do it, uh we're going to get the powershell version, because we love powershell and we're going to get the last security update.

B

And let me get out of there again and go on the script block 3.

B

So this is a it's a little more uh complex, we're going to do a few things differently, because we're getting ready to really hit the field.

B

So the first thing I want to do is I want to make a generic list that I'm going to start storing my data in.

B

Generic lists, if you're not familiar, they are much well, I'm not even going to say they're better than a raise. If, if you would have been putting all this into an array, don't do it um and just be fair um check this video out sometime when you have some time uh from powershell saturday, oh, come on really.

C

Well, let's jump to the chase there.

B

You want to say yeah yeah, you want.

C

To say that arrays probably are not as good is because they're a fixed size.

B

They are fixed size and every time every time you add to an array, you're rebuilding the array and you get exponentially more in more trouble that way. So let me stop trying to show videos uh we'll get some links in there, I'm sure.

B

um So uh so a generic list lets you keep adding without the overhead of recreation right, so we're gonna make that out up first and we're going to declare that it's ps object, list script block 3 we're going to have I like responses, my variable uh it's my object name because it makes sense to me just like object, one, it's a new object and we're going to give it these properties, everything we're looking for and then a little more right, we're going to name our wmi properties after the class that we're grabbing just so we can make it a little easier on the other side when we need to find things if we know what class they're in, we know which sub property they're in.

B

System family again, since we're doing this from scratch, it's going to be the same thing with the rest method. I won't go over that. I just that's the way, I'm doing it and then computer name computer names all over the place in these wmi queries. But I do.

C

Want to put it.

B

Up front and we're just going to use an existing.

B

Property, something we already grabbed: win32 bios, ps computer name.

C

Hey david, why are you getting this together? So there was a question thomas nielsen asked: don't you have to allow remoting on the target and it's a good point.

B

Yeah I shouldn't mention that um so.

B

I should have mentioned that up front. If you need, you need win, rm access, basically, and I'm I'm lucky enough to have that predominantly we have a few machines that are uh not when rm compliant.

C

But, but to be fair, so you're right, however, windows, 8 and forward it's on by default, unless your org is actively turning it off. So remoting is something that you can leverage unless your company is working to shut that off and that's a whole other topic, but I mean I would implore anybody to look into enabling remoting for the people that need to manage systems.

B

Yeah- and I I believe I I don't- I don't know a ton about the background, but I understand that that when rm is as safe, if not maybe a little safer than ssh, but I can't talk about that exactly not with any authority.

B

A

Are talking to the authority right now? uh He is.

C

Very much about it, so he can help guide you that.

A

Yeah go ahead, go ahead, david.

B

Okay, sorry, um so I already ran.

B

While we were talking, I ran the invoke command against script block three, and these are my results. Let me just run that chassis type again, so we can see the whole thing like we were expecting it and then. Finally, my data is our generic list, so I'm just going to do in mydata.add my query, 3.

B

and now my data equals that, if I do it again just because I only have one set of data right now, I do it again. We've got two iterations of this right, so we can just keep adding on to this thing.

B

B

All right, um so it would I'm just going to leave it like this. um Why do we get all that data, um partly because we've already been asked for more data, and it's going to happen again.

B

Secondly, we got pretty much every data point that we're interested in in the context and then a little more. We maybe spend a little more time on the front end. I forget how long that took for me to code. I think it's actually easier, but our run times between script block, 2 and scroll block 3, which I haven't really shown they're pretty similar because you're making a lot of the same calls.

B

My one addendum to that is that getting the last kb I use get hotfix and get hotfix can take a while. um It is a little notorious in my enterprise, at least in my former section of the enterprise for hanging, so it can screw you up. So if you don't need it, don't get it. I'm just I'm just putting in my code because it's fun.

A

I think one of the the values there or these one of the takeaways that you know people should understand when doing some of this work is that you are modularizing the code and the objective is to put the code into a place where it can be reused, and the next part is to think that we're taking this code and we are sending it to especially with remoting we're sending it to the other side and letting the other side do all the processing all the work getting a bunch of data inside your script.

A

You can actually, as you kind of see, you're building your own custom object at the very end or in the code, so that you only send back the data that you care about, and so some of the things that I've seen other people do is do the remoting, but hey dual. You can also, you know, get wmi that computer over there but you're getting all that data back all those pieces.

A

All those parts, especially if you get wmy, fix hot fix you're getting every single hot fix, but like do you really need it, or do you want to let the remote computer do all that work, just select out the the name and the hotfix number, and that's all you needed well, then send just those two pieces back or you know that kind of supposed to get the entire object back.

A

I think that's a really important thing to understand when you're dealing with some of this stuff is that in this fashion you know sometimes in in the powershell world people you hear people talk about shift, left or filter left. Well, that's part of exactly what this is doing is you're, actually shifting all the way to the remote computer and letting do that computer. Do all the work and do all the stuff, and then you just wait for it to come back into other. um Get you just the pieces.

A

You want you're only sending the stuff across the wire that you want and which is very important, especially when you do it at scale, and I know you guys are doing a bunch of stuff at scale, or at least you know you're not doing. Oh, I need 10 computers, no yeah. I just did across you know 3 000 or more. So that's a very important thing.

B

Right and my my enterprise- I didn't I didn't mention um in in the beginning- it kind of says that I'm in a big enterprise, my former segment, was a little over 50 000 machines, luckily a common hardware platform for the most part, but I'm dealing with, I think 155 000 right now, no commonality and we've still got windows. 7 windows 8.1 out there. So it's a lot of things to play with I'm still writing powershell 2 at work, which is disturbing it's very hard for being so low level, I guess or so backwards.

B

It's much harder. A lot of tricks in five, one that make things easier, um yeah and- and that's um part part of why I didn't discuss get sim- is that getsim can do all of this stuff differently. It can kind of do its own reporting, but if I did need to get say, registry responses or something else in this same script blog- I don't. I think that would.

C

B

Another call for me.

B

Anyway, I appreciate that phil. So the way I I tend to do this is a simple loop. um I should go back here um all right systems in the field. There are two main ways. um One is the way I do it, which is terrible, which is uh just looping through a bunch of systems.

B

uh The problem with that is it's serial, which means I get information from laptop one and then it comes back to me. I get information from the laptop too. It comes back to me two to five seconds every time that starts adding up. uh If my loop breaks on laptop three, that's all I got if I'm home and let that thing run then tough. You know in the morning I got nothing.

B

A harder for me, but faster.

B

Option is is to go threaded, I'm no good at this, so I don't want to talk about it. I don't know how to do it. It's an art. It is very much an art as well as a science. uh The guys who are good with it are pretty amazing with it.

B

um So I'm gonna do a simple loop, real quick. um I think we all know what what loops are so I'll generally get a couple of machines.

B

I get hostnames a lot of times from tanium, so I got this count thing I'll, just convert that into a csv or from csv.

B

So now systems I got a bunch of computer names. I can go to.

B

Doing another generic list, I am just doing a systems.4h and then I'm result, which is my list dot, add and instead of returning a variable like we were before, I'm just going to invoke the command right in that ad.

B

So I'm wrapping it as a variable. So that's nice and tidy. So I'm just invoking command ps item computer name, script, clock script, block three!

B

I'm not gonna run that because I don't have laptop one two, five or nine on my network, um but you can you can imagine how it you know how that should work if you're familiar with loops.

B

um The kind of last part is: who are you getting data for um I'll? Show you what.

B

C

B

My list right, um I convert to json.

B

If I convert that to json that's a ton of data right, my boss does not want to see that, and some of it doesn't even make sense unless you really start digging down into it. So um if the date is for me, I might convert to json, then just out file it to of to a file that I can then import.

B

If it's for one of you, I might send you that json file and tell you how to how to access it. What to expect- or you know, if I'm from really cool, I might make it an api that you can get and then we don't have to share files.

B

If I do this every week and you're expecting new data on monday, if that api is up to date, then you've got my data without too many headaches.

B

But what about the boss bosses want a flat table? They want the data they ask you for and they're gonna want more so be flexible. um The other part I know about boss is is sometimes they get asked for that data from somebody else, so they may be techies. They may be able to get it themselves, but they're asking you, because they don't have time and just give me what I want and be able to give me more. If I need it.

B

So god did I do anything on this all right, so here I'm going to do I made a new list called boss.

B

B

um This time, I'm going to forage through my data come on. Look at each item, not sure why 4h for each method was not working for me, but I I didn't have time to look at that.

B

I'm basically doing the same thing I was doing in earlier script blocks, except that this time I've got an object that is going to be comprised of results from previous objects, solving out my data, so we're we're shrinking the data down to work for uh other people right now like like, we saw from the convert json.

B

uh This is complicated where the heck is all this stuff. um Fortunately it's all up here if we started here, we probably we probably know where these things are. If we knew to look for them anyway, but since we named our sub objects after our classes, we know that serial number is in property in 32 bios, as is manufacturer.

B

uh We know where these things are, because we knew to look for them in the right place.

B

So if we go back down to where we're selecting data computer name was top level reboot top level um we're going to grab these items from when bios win32 bios, they wanted all these other things that they asked for we're just kind of digging those out. Let's go ahead and run.

B

B

So now we got a, I mean it's it's in list form, instead of a flat form, but we're giving them basically what they wanted. They didn't ask for computer name, but what good is uh bios version? If you don't have computer name, if it's an outlier.

B

B

B

B

We do boss data convert.

A

Convert you missing an name.

B

I do that in uninstall every day I write ooh install all the time.

B

All right, it's too big for this screen, but right this is uh this is a csv we can send to them. They can open in excel, they can make. You know they can make computer name green if they want to, they can make american mega trends pink whatever they want to do. You know, and people have with excel um and the other benefit to this is if we uh would, we discover that they actually wanted something else. They didn't tell us this time that they want security status.

B

I just pulled security status out of the air because it was easy to find.

B

Now, boss data has got security status. We didn't have to do any more queries, because we've got all this data we just we just want to make sure we get the right data back to them.

A

um I just want to say that uh yeah a bunch of people talking this is I like how you got a bunch of data and you pulled it all back and you pulled it into like the json file and even the other objects, because it really gives you the ability to get more data than you need and then, when your boss then says hey give me this other like well, I got that too and then you want other well. I got that too. That you'd already pulled the data at once and so kind of like.

A

What I was saying is that you pulled all that data back as one port or just the parts that you potentially want, and you pulled it all now, and so, when you need it later, here's more data or hopefully you don't have to go, pull more data, but it's available for you now because you've done it ahead of time and it's organized in a simple format, especially with like the wind bios serial number manufacturer.

A

It's all inside that extra object, so you can even pull out the parts you want, because I also saw you just you took the whole class, so anything comes back in that class. It just gets thrown into that. You know subset object. So I'm like hey it's easier for me to pull all those extra pieces because it's already there and I didn't have to think about what else is there. It just gave me whatever was there, and so I don't have to pull that pieces.

A

So I thought it was a really good benefit and I kudos to you and and chad. I said, I'm stealing that code so.

B

So like just just to that point like uh this win32 baseboard, this is me just converting it to json. We got all this data back.

B

Do I need any of this half of this who knows, but when I up in script block one when I'm making that that single call to windows baseboard I'm getting all of this anyway, so so, why throw all of it away? If I might need it, so I mean you're making the call you might as well turn return the data you're, not you're, wasting more time by making the call twice or have go back. God forbid. You have to pin a million machines again to try and get one extra piece of the data so.

B

um Click I'll kind of wrap, this up things we didn't talk about. This is a this is definitely a ryan leap trick that I learned test your connection. If you can't get to it, don't bother trying to authenticate, because sometimes kerberos will take forever trying to talk to a machine that it can't even talk to.

B

I like to do an error handling with my test connect, because sometimes I don't I don't need 100 responses. I just need a lot of responses, so I'll try to catch around my test connection and I'll get out pretty fast.

A

How do you do that.

B

um See if I've got an example of that, I thought I did.

B

A

Show you the are you throwing that out if, after it hasn't responded in time or using time as your your throw or.

B

um I am using test connection to computer name, I'm doing a count of one generally and error action is stop, uh because I find I find I get a lot of red. I don't know if, if it's something about the way, I do things, but if I can't connect to the machine at all, I wind up getting errors like you know, just like a regular ping, where it says, request time down whatever I'm getting a lot of red and powershell.

B

A

Okay, so you're just throwing a test connection, which is a single ping, so give me a single ping. If you can't ping it once skip over it.

B

Yes, yeah it will, it will definitely sit on a machine. Invoke command will sit on a machine trying to authenticate to it and it can take a little more time.

B

So yeah just try test connect. Air action. Stop catch just keep going. uh Maybe it's a good idea to uh that's what I was looking for.

A

Yeah, did you talk about this code right here this right here actually.

B

So so this is something I did just the other day and I was like. Oh, this is what I'm talking about in two days. I should know all this, so I'm making a script block. um I'm I've got an apex out in the field that we deployed to cat and it failed. So I need to get these cat users back to the original version.

B

So I'm trying to figure out who's got the old version. Who's got the new version. um If you don't know apex, it's basically, a phone application on your computer, um probably candy crush, is an apex if you've got that on windows, so I'm just using get app x. I'm looking for the old I'm looking for the new.

B

And then yeah so test block here, I'm doing try test connection and if I get to it I'm responding with true so test block is true.

B

Or test run is either true or false, based on if test block is successful right.

B

So if test run is true, I'm going to note that I was able to ping the machine, so I set system ping equals true, and then I'm going to try and evoke command to invoke command to it and run this script block.

B

If I'm able to do that, I'm going to say that when rm is true when rm is one of my oh see, I did. Let me put this.

B

A

Props on your laptop names too, or the.

A

B

Usernames yeah so yeah, so uh name new name, because these these people are not team, peter um I'm making a property for if I was able to ping the machine, because if I got no results and I'd, if I can win rm to it, then I'm going to note that because then, if these guys are empty, then I know it's not a failure.

B

If true true empty empty, then I know it's got neither of them or I'm pretty sure it's got um so script block test block we check and see. If we can touch the machine, if we can hang it, we try and get into it. We know that that's true, then we try and get.

B

We should try and get this result from the apex which my brain is shh.

B

Somehow I'm doing this wrong, I feel oh, no, no script block checking for those versions, so I've run the script block on the remote machine. That's it.

B

So I've run that script block. I try to run that script block. If I'm successful, then I'm either true that I've got this version or I'm true that I've got that version or I'm empty right.

B

So my resulting set is going to tell me what machines I could reach over the network, which ones I could actually touch and then which, if any, have got, which version which ones need remediation, which ones are in great shape. Right now, and this code is on my github also. I just threw this up there as a as an example.

B

I think that was unless you want to talk about that more um which I'm I'm down for, but I think that's kind of it for it. um What one thing I like to do, but it's a little hard, is to record as you go, let's say: you've got. You are looking at a thousand machines and you're, maybe getting a flat set of results.

B

If you can write that to a database or if you want to write every object back to its own json file, that might be a good idea.

A

I think one of the things at least one of the tricks that I've used in the past- and you know everybody who's still on the call feel free to share some of the tricks you've done in the past is I've on some of these like doing things in mass.

A

Is I've written I've used one script block to actually dump the file, dump the data to an xml file or to an object which then gets written to a client xml onto the local machine, and then I have another script block that goes back behind it and then goes and gets that data. So if the script is running for a long long period of time and and could potentially error out- and I don't want to wait for it- I just want to get the data when it's there and when it's not there.

A

Well, then just come back later for the data, and so I just dump the data to the local machine into an xml file and then go get the xml and the data from the xml file later. So that's what I've done in the past. It's like you know it. Just basically, I had a script to basically get me.

A

The entire contents of the entire c drive like give me all the files on the c drive and that takes hours to run, but I didn't want to wait for every single machine, and so I ran it on the road local in the remote machine and I just dumped all that data to a file. And then I go got the file when the file was complete, yeah, so just a trick.

B

Yeah and I'm I'm not good with xml, so I I've not played with that one too much. I I've used I've used sqlite 3 and you can basically make a make a string out of your query and pipe it through sqlite and it'll. Just keep running things into your database.

B

Also on on that same kind of note record as you go, it might be a good idea if you have access to do this sort of thing from.

C

A server rather.

B

Than from your own computer, because guys like me in the packaging department will decide that you need a java update and we need to reboot your computer two in the morning and then you are sol.

B

So uh it takes a change request to reboot a server generally, so we'll let that happen. um uh Another thing: that's kind of cool is.

B

I like to clear my variables.

B

A lot of times.

B

If you build your script block a little strangely, I don't know, I don't think, but you get a positive response from laptop 12 and then response from laptops variables are still populated. That can skew your results, sir.

B

I find to be a very good example, but first of all I won't go to it, but go to go to littlejohn's error handling. It changed my life. That was a really great presentation.

B

I was doing this on some machines about about the time I wrote this thing and I was getting a registry entry that was supposed to be a date.

B

And the date did not exist on all the machines, so let's do an error like register. Key e or the date was not entry and I was getting zero zero zero one at midnight. Why do these machines all have the beginning of the millennium on them?

B

I was. I was casting the string. I was expecting as a date. I was apparently getting a error code of one which I was then passing into uh turning into date, time, which, if you want, we can do that real.

B

Quick, so that's where you know I was getting all these machines that were showing that they were 2020 something years old um or that they had been acting, and we were. My boss was a little concerned that my dates were that screwed up on a package I wrote so had I handled that error better. I wouldn't have gotten skoofy dates.

B

I think that I think that's all I got. um I can try and talk about some more things if you want what's up.

A

Oh, that was good. I actually, I think uh I got a couple good, you know tidbits out of it and uh I certainly want to uh know some. Some people were in the chat. You know mentioning some things, and so I think we could all got got at least a little bit something out of it and that's really always a good thing. At least that's the the value of why we come to these groups, and we, uh you know the value is getting content out of it. You know we're.

A

We've all have a wide breadth of experience. We've been doing this a long time and we've also been doing this just a short period of time, and so everybody picks up little tidbits as they go along, and I think a lot of people have gotten that at least I have so I speak to that.

A

So you know we certainly want to open up the mics and if you have a question or if you want to mention anything or at least think of anything that even you know, maybe david hasn't mentioned, or even things that you want to think that were valuable to you or you might want to you know, steal, slash, borrow slash, you know, pilfer, you know feel free to mention that as well. So I think you did a good job david. I appreciate your uh coming to the group and sharing.

B

Oh, I appreciate it.

C

All right, why don't you want me to stop the recording here.

A

Unless anybody has any questions so we'll give it a couple seconds feel free to uh open up the mics. If you want to uh ask any questions, if there are no other questions that uh david can answer, then uh certainly we can stop recording.

C

I have a uh something I want to share. That's it's not a question for david, but so I have been coming around to the idea of invoke command more and more and relying on real remoting, because when you do that you actually change the way you write code and what I mean by that is I find myself when you write functions or write tools.

C

You know when you, when you start out and you build a tool. Maybe you start out writing a tool and you write some query to be able to grab information, and then you have to say well. How am I going to do that? If I want to do it for multiple machines and maybe maybe a command has a parameter for a computer name or something like that. But, generally speaking, when you do that, you end up in some sort of loop. You know where you do test connection.

C

If the machine is on then run something and then go to the next one, and that becomes very time consuming because now you've just lined everything up to happen, sequentially and I think every that's natural for people to sort of write code. That way and when you rely on invoke command.

C

You know you can invoke your own machine, so what you can do and what david was highlighting earlier with the script block is you can write everything in a script block and then you can pass that script block to an invoke command statement at the end of your function and the invoke command can run against the local machine and what that does is it removes the performance bottleneck you have when you have multiple machines, because now you're saying I this is the code I want to run, but I'm just going to give this to invoke command and invoke command.

C

You figure out how to get to all these machines now. There's the whole idea of testing and making sure connections are alive. That's a different story, but you've taken away this idea that test and machine it's on run, go to the next machine and go down the list iteratively. So um I have been writing my code.

C

That way where I write a block of code and then I pass that block to an invoke command, even if that's going to run against the local machine and the cool thing about that that I find that I didn't appreciate in the beginning was a lot of times when you output, something and you have to format your output and you need to take into a into into account for that remote machine name. How do I get that into my output?

C

Maybe I have to figure how to query the mini sheen, save it to a variable, put it in a select statement that all goes away invoke. Does that all for you? So if you run a command and you invoke to yourself the output, that's going to come back is just going to be output.

C

Now, if you run it against two machines, and one of them is remote. Invoke command is automatically going to append on the ps computer name variable for you, so it just. I just find it makes it easier to write code and the code that I write runs more efficiently, because I've eliminated all the tools that I would normally use to connect to a machine and try to connect to a bunch of machines, because I'm not really doing it. The most efficient way.

A

B

A

Want to go ahead, david.

B

As I said, I I always noticed that invoke command tells you what computer you ran it on, but I always forget about it and I I wind up getting the host name, um but I I do think it. It helps you write kind of kind of cleaner code and I I did still make a little mistake.

B

All my uh talk about not making a wmi call twice um anytime in that presentation that I wanted last last boot time I was making another call, instead of getting it from an existing object, which I should have been doing but yeah, I think it I think, thinking in script blocks makes you a little more efficient or it helps you get there.

A

Yeah- and I think one of the other things is that some people were mentioning in the uh in the chat, was the idea of arguments. So if you kind of look like what mike was saying, is the idea that hey you can do your testing? You can do your you know like building of your script block itself by working with um your own local machine, so you have a local machine, so I want to build this script.

A

I want to run it a couple times, I'm getting the data I'm looking for, but if you do all that data and you're getting it in the form that it, you can then pass in variables, but you can work with your local computer and you can do that. So that is one of the things that that is valuable is to pass in actual arguments into your script blocks themselves, and so there I don't think you mentioned it. I didn't really see it. I was waiting for it, but uh there is a specific uh argument.

A

Type is called using is you can pass in using- or at least you can use the using and pass it back up? The other way, so there is a thing to play with that game, so it's certainly interesting and um can be used, and once you start thinking in that scale it once you think in that mode of scripting. In that fashion, here's my script block. Here's my my code, I'm going to pass it to the remote computer.

A

The computer could be me, but at that point then it's a very easy transition to move to 10 computers, to 100 computers, to 500 computers, to 50, 000 computers. It's very easy to move through that, and so it just scales for free effectively.

B

And- and I and I didn't get into using- because I'm not very good with it, but um and- and I also didn't mention that, if I say x, equals three outside the script block and then I try calling x within the script block that doesn't work, um especially on a rope machine. You did.

A

B

Job that would be where using would come in right um or an argument list.

A

Yeah to that same point is that you know you didn't get into that at this point, but also, I think you did a very good job in the regard is that you clearly defined what is possible with what you had, and you didn't really confuse everybody with adding to those pieces of you know there are a ton of content out on the internet, and you know we can even talk about after this meeting.

A

You know some of those nuances in which playing with other parameters and other arguments and passing in data and passing out data and deserialized and serialized, and all that fun stuff and that that is another rabbit hole that we don't need to go down, but to know that it's out there. This is, if you're you're working with these kind of problems and you're going. Why am I not getting the data I'm looking for? Why?

A

How do I get this kind of data well know that it is possible, so feel free assured be assured that it is possible, but it's just this is how you do it there. There's just you've got to go down a different road. We're not a different road but go down that road you'll find the answer and come back and continue.

C

On all right, so what I'm going to do here is we're going to say. First of all, let's say thank you to david for presenting tonight. I think you did a great job david. Thank you for sharing the information with us. um You did an thanks job and it looks like we've hit a little bit of lull here in the question, so I'm going to stop our recording.