Thursday, March 29, 2018

PS template - Splatted update snippet


3/29/2018: Over the years of working with Powershell for quick admin work, I've become a sizable fan of splatting powershell commands.

First a 'Splat' Introduction:

 

For folks late to the party, "splatting' leverages standard hashtables to encapsulate 'sets' of parameters for commandlets. The short form is that you take all the parameters you'll be feeding to a given commandlet, configure them by matching name->value combos into a hash varable, and then, by specifying the hash variable with an 'at' (@) prefix rather than dollar-sign ($), Powershell & the commandlet interpret your splatted hash table as the set of parameters with which to execute your desired command.

Powershell script: Check HP Array Config Utility CLI

3/29/2018: Script that can be used to collect drive-failure errors out of HP Array Config Utility (via the CLI tool).

I'm in the process of migrating my firm's core mail assets to Exchange Online. But, in the interrum, I've still got some aging original hardware holding users. Which, naturally with increasing hours of uptime, sheds old drives on a regular basis.

I generally like to have SCOM watching & alerting on this type of material.  But some of these systems run in locations that are somewhat 'adverse' to going deep on monitoring infrastructure and overhead.

So, when faced with a challenge, we roll up our sleeves and roll-our-own ad-hoc solutions to keep those old boys propped vertical, at least until I can finish draining the hosted users online. :D