While looking for a quick way to check when a SQL database was last backed up, the immediate thing that came into my mind is this post. I trolled around the parameters and functions of  ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.smo.Server’ object and developed below tiny script to list the last backup date time of databases in a SQL server.

function Get-SQLLastBackupTime {

param(

[Parameter(mandatory=$true)]

[string]$DBServer

)

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO’) | Out-Null

$server = New-Object (‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server’) “$DBServer”

$server.databases | select Name, LastBackupDate

}

Hope this help …

My wordpress dashboard showing notifications for while about new updates of some of the plug-ins I use. Since the updates are for important plug-ins I decided to install them. The moment I select the plug-ins and upgrade, the dashboard started showing the message that entering maintenance mode and upgrading the plug-ins. I thought it is expected and left the window like that and searching in google for something else. After sometime, I accessed my blog URL and it gave me a message that “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. I waited for some more time but no change in status. It didn’t took me much time to realize that some thing has screwed my blog. Surprisingly the dashboard also not available and throwing same message.

I googled about this error  and understood that it is a sort of bug with WordPress which leaves website in maintenance mode while upgrading the plug-ins. The solution to this problem is as follows…

1. Connect to your site using FTP. I prefer using some rich clients than using ftp from command line. My favorite is FileZilla
2. Go to the WP installation directory where you will find wp-admin, wp-content folders.
3. Locate .maintenance file and delete 
4. Access your website now and it should be back. So did mine.

Have you ever had a requirement to see when a process is started? I generally come across this requirement. Every time, I use process explorer to fetch this data, but today I decided to have my own powershell function.

The Get-Process cmdlet will not provide you any details about process creation time. You definitely need to rely on a WMI query against win32_process class for this information. So, here is the code.

function Get-ProcessCreationTime {
param(
[string]$Name,
$Processid,
$computer = $env:COMPUTERNAME
)
if($Name) {

([wmi]””).ConvertToDateTime((gwmi -Class Win32_Process -computer $computer -Filter “Name=’$Name'”).CreationDate)

}

if($Processid) {

([wmi]””).ConvertToDateTime((gwmi -Class Win32_Process -computer $computer -Filter “handle=’$Processid'”).CreationDate)

}

}

Usage :

Get-ProcessCreationTime -Name notepad.exe

Get-ProcessCreationTime -ProcessId 1234

Use -Computer parameter if you want to query process creation time from remote computer.

Note: Currently this function won’t support if there is more than one instance of a given process. For example, this might throw errors if multiple notepad processes are running in computer and you query for notepad.exe process creation time. In such case I prefer using -ProcessID parameter. Soon I will update this function to handle multiple processes as well.

Hope this helps…. Happy learning…

Below small function helps you to list databases in a given database server using powershell. This will come handy for you when you quickly want to check the databases list without logging on to the server.

function Get-SQLDatabases {
param(
[Parameter(mandatory=$true)]
[string]$DBServer
)
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO’) | Out-Null

$server = New-Object (‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server’) “$DBServer”
$server.databases | select Name

}

Usage :

C:>Get-SQLDatabases -DBServer MSSQLSRV1

Hope this helps…

Since last one and half year, I have been working on Windows 7 Operating system and in my experience “Auto Tuning” in windows 7/vista/windows 2008 R2 is the most possible culprit for any network related problems. If you see a network related problem in these operating systems and cannot determine what is the cause, I suggest you try disabling “auto tuning” first.

I know that “auto tuning” is one of the features introduced with windows 7/vista to improve OS operations on network. Basically what it does is, it adjusts the TCP window size to improve the network operations. Though it sounds good in theory, I have seen numerous amount of posts over internet where disabling “auto tuning” addressed many issues like, slow data copy, slowness in email delivery, slow outlook mail caching times, and a few application data transfer related issues. Most of these issues you will see when performing the transfer operations over a WAN link.

So, considering above all, I would like to share the procedure for disabling/enabling “Auto Tuning” in windows 7 environment which may come handy for you in troubleshooting network related issues…

Procedure:

1. Open Command prompt with elevated rights
2. Run the command netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled
3. This disables the auto tuning
4. Similar to enable auto tuning back, use the command netsh interface tcp set global autotuningl=normal

 If you want to see the current status of auto tuning, use netsh interface tcp show global

Hope this helps you.

Today I got a requirement to convert a normal string with value “20100610” to date format using powershell. I thought I will be able to do it easily with “Get-Date” cmdlet but it never happened that easy. After some searching, I figureout the way.

$strtime = “20100610”
[datetime]::ParseExact($strtime,”yyyyMMdd”,$null)

While doing the conversion from string value to date/time format, first you should know what you are trying to convert. The string in my case is a eight character string in which first 4 characters belongs to year(yyyy), the next two belongs to month(MM) and the remaining two belongs to date(dd). That is why I used yyyyMMdd format in the parseexact function.

Executing above code results in below output.

If you are not interested about time details in output, just make the code a bit complex like below.

([datetime]::ParseExact($strtime,”yyyyMMdd”,$null)).toshortdatestring()

Today, I quickly wanted to check to which AD site a IP belongs to. If I am the computer where that IP is assinged, it is wasy to find out this information. Since that computer is offline/not reachable, I need some other way.

After bit of googling, I came across below usage of dfsutil. I am very familiar with DFSUTIL but never focused much on the “/sitename” parameter.

So, here you go, if your computer IP is, 192.168.10.130 you know to which AD site it belongs by executing “dfsutil.exe /sitename:192.168.10.130” and outlook will display the site name.

C:>dfsutil /sitename:192.168.10.130

Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) Dfs Utility Version 4.2
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1991-2005. All Rights Reserved.

 Site for 192.168.10.130 is INDIA

Done processing this command.

C:>

In above example INDIA is my active directory site name.

I wrote a script today to quickly know who all part of members of given group in a windows server. I felt it’s worth sharing with the global community given its use case. This script can be further enhanced to find out if a given user is part of the administrators group and for other requirements.

function get-localgroupmembers {
[cmdletbinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
$group,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
$computer
)

$MemberNames = @()

$objGroup= [ADSI]”WinNT://$computer/$Group,group”
$Members = @($objGroup.psbase.Invoke(“Members”))
$Members | ForEach-Object {
$MemberNames += $_.GetType().InvokeMember(“Name”, ‘GetProperty’, $null, $_, $null)
}
write-host “”
write-host “The following accounts are members of $group on $computer” -backgroundcolor yellow -foregroundcolor blue
write-host “”
Write-host $MemberNames
write-host “”

}

Example:

[PS]C:>Get-LocalGroupMembers -computer SERVER1 -group “Administrators”

[PS]C:>Get-LocalGroupMembers -computer SERVER1 -group “Power Users”

Hope this helps you

I bought a new Cisco LINKSYS WRT120N wireless router and noticed that reset button is not working properly in it. That means if I press and hold the reset button to reset the router settings to factory defaults, it is not working. After some troubleshooting, I figured out the problem and fixed it. The solution here is to upgrade the firmware of the wireless router to latest version.

To do this, follow below steps.

1. Download latest firmware for WRT120N wireless router from Cisco site(http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/wireless/lbc/WRT120N ) and save to disk
2. Now takeout the router power -> Hold the reset button -> Connect the power
3. Now connect a network cable from your computer to port#1 of wireless router. To surprise you here, the LED#4 glows though you connected the cable to port#1. Don’t worry…. This is not much to bother
4. Open browser in your computer and go to http://192.168.1.1
5. A window appears asks you to input the firmware file. Here select the file and click on reset
6. This upgrades the firmware version to latest and now you can use the regular method for resetting the password to factory settings by holding the reset key. The reset key should work now as expected

Feel free to write in comments section if you have some questions.