d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
Microsoft PowerShell
When using the System.Net.WebClient class you are actually using a class that wraps WebRequesr and WebResponse with some benefits as abstracting stream and handling logic. However, this, comes at a price and sometimes along with some errors, too. When a web server responds with an HTTP 500 Status the WebClient throws an exception and you do not have access to […]
DeathByCapture provides a .NET assembly for interaction with the mighty workforce overseas that lets you overcome those nasty captchas. Unfortunately you cannot use the assembly when you want to ‘[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile()’ as the ‘DeathByCaptcha.HttpClient’ is an abstract base class where you cannot pass the login credentials as arguments to the constructor. Adding the assembly to the GAC is not possible without […]
As already described on elsewhere on the Internet and on Microsoft Connect, the new Invoke-WebRequest Cmdlet, that comes with PowerShell v3, handles form fields incorrectly. Instead of referring to the name attributes of input elements within a form the Fields Collection stores the ids of the attributes under the ‘key’ property. As in the following example you see the text […]
[UPDATE 2014-04-08] Thanks to Meir I updated the post as the code was missing the definition for the regular expression. Now I corrected that, so the code should work now. In addition, I found out that the apple web server is not serving ‘Set-Cookie’ header according to RFC so I changed the example from apple.com to google.ch (as we are […]
I recently had the need to automatically retrieve and process emails. As I am using Office365 what could have been closer than trying to retrieve the emails via PowerShell and EWS. What I was not aware of is that the supplied Cmdlets that come with the “MSOnlineExtended” module only really deal with account and administration. And the Cmdlet in the […]
Recently I had the task to automate a few things regarding AppleIDs. One of things was to create, change and verify AppleIDs. Having no tools (apart from Apples inofficial buggy AppleScript screen-click-automation scripts) I had a look at the HTTP communication between iTunes/the web client and the iTunes Store and AppleID servers. The login to AppleID is rather straightforward by […]
The other day I was using Fiddler to examine some web traffic to automate some tasks. I then stumbled upon a cool Fiddler extension called Request to Code (by Chad Sowald), which takes any HTTP(s) request and converts it to C# code using the System.Net.WebRequest and System.Net.WebResponse classes. Unfortunately, the extension does not support PowerShell. As I am using the […]
When trying to define a RepitionInterval on a schedule job of less than one minute you receive the following error message: However, there is a workaround on this: you define additional triggers that fire every minute and have them start eg. every 15 seconds: There is a maximum of 48 triggers you can define for any one PowerShell scheduled job […]
When using scheduled jobs in PowerShell v3 you can pass parameters to the scheduled job via the “ArgumentList” parameter. However, you can only pass values via its position (instead via its name) as the parameter expects an array of objects: So it is not possible to run any of your scripts as “scheduled jobs” when they expect only names parameters. […]
Serialising and Deserialising data structures is pretty easy when using Export-CliXml/Import-CliXml. However, there are some gotchas. In addition to the already described bug when using [ordered] hashtable in PowerShell v3 with Import-CliXml there is another error when importing [Array] with Import-CliXml: an [Array] becomes an [ArrayList]. The following code shows the problem: Again, this error seems to occur when you do […]
Using PowerCLI for fun and profit in general is a great thing to do – in general… However, in certain cases PowerCLIs implementation is much slower than using the underlying REST calls directly. This is especially true when using Get-CiVm to get information about a vCloud Director (vCD) virtual machine. Consider the following fragment: This is all pretty fast, as […]
Recently I quickly mentioned the universal PowerCLI applet Search-Cloud that can be used when dealing with vCloud Director. Howevery it seems you have to verify its output when using it to query Provider Vdc parameters. The output mixes the “allocation” and “used” counters for CPU, Memory and Storage as you can see in the example below (“used” is larger than […]
With PowerCLI’s ConnectCI-Server CmdLet it is pretty easy to login to a vCD host. And for most of the time the supplied CmdLets are sufficient enough to solve the problems we deal with it daily. However, sometimes we would like to make specific REST calls to vCD directly (for example when the Searc-Cloud CmdLet is not doing what we want). […]
In vCloud API (via REST, vCO PlugIn, or PowerCLI) you can query CPU, memory and disk usage for VDCs. However, when retrieving the values for current CPU usage you always get ‘0’ – regardless of real current usage. Values for memory and storage seem correct. There is a workaround for this via querying the underlying vCenter resource pool for that […]
With PowerCLI for vCD and vCenter it is particularily easy to determine the underlying vCenter resource pool for any vCloud Organization VDC. You first retrieve the resource pool relation via the Search-Cloud CmdLet via the urn of the VDC and then use the Get-ResourcePool CmdLet to get the actual resource pool (via Typed Queries): done.
Along with the CmdLets in “VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud” you will find a CmdLet that is called “Search-Cloud”. In fact this is one of the most powerful CmdLets in ypur arsenal of vCD CmdLet tools. It is especially useful as it uses the new Query Service of vCD and is thus much faster than the other traditional Get-* CmdLets. The tradeoff is that […]
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