Katherine Villyard

I wrote these in PowerShell to run with nrpe/nsclient.  They query Dell OpenManage’s command line and return a Nagios-readable result.

(There are plugins available on Nagios Exchange, but they all seemed to be… more than I wanted.  I just wanted to know, “Is my RAID okay?”  Because whenever I’ve had an Event, I like to monitor for that event happening again.)

This checks the Physical Disks in the array.  If one or more disks reports anything other than OK, it alerts:

$status = 0; omreport storage pdisk controller=0 | Where-Object {$_ -match "^status"} | %{if($_ -notlike "*OK*"){$status=2}}

If ($status -eq 0) {
Write-Host "OK:  Physical Disks report OK"
} else {
Write-Host "CRITICAL:  Check OpenManage"
}
exit $status

You might have to edit the scripts to check Virtual Disk health.  It could probably be made more elegant, but it suits my purposes.

This script checks the health of my C drive (vdisk 0):

omreport storage vdisk controller=0 vdisk=0 | ?{$_ -match "^status"} | %{$status=0}{if($_ -notlike "*OK*"){$status=2}}

If ($status -eq 0) {
Write-Host "OK:  Virtual Disk (OS) reports OK"
} else {
Write-Host "CRITICAL:  Check OpenManage"
}
exit $status

This script checks the health of my data drive (E, vdisk 1):

omreport storage vdisk controller=0 vdisk=1 | ?{$_ -match "^status"} | %{$status=0}{if($_ -notlike "*OK*"){$status=2}}

If ($status -eq 0) {
Write-Host "OK:  Virtual Disk (data) reports OK"
} else {
Write-Host "CRITICAL:  Check OpenManage"
}
exit $status

Running these involves adding lines like this to the external script section of nsclient.ini or equivalent:

check_physicaldisk = cmd /c echo scripts\\pdiskcheck.ps1; exit($lastexitcode) | powershell.exe -command -

check_virtualdisk = cmd /c echo scripts\\vdiskcheck.ps1; exit($lastexitcode) | powershell.exe -command -

And lines like this to command.cfg in Nagios:

define command {
command_name    check_physicaldisk
command_line    /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c check_physicaldisk
}
define command {
command_name    check_CRaid
command_line    /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c check_virtualdisk
}

As of yesterday, I’m a Microsoft MVP in Enterprise Security. 😀

Don’t you love looking at your old scripts?

I’ve rewritten all of our maintenance jobs, including the jobs in task manager that handle SBSMonitoring.  I’ve rid myself of Windows Internal Database, but was still using the script I wrote for it.  Not any more!

I decided to use and abuse Ola Hallengren’s scripts, so what I’m using for SBSMonitoring is:

Download and install CommandExecute.sql, DatabaseIntegrityCheck.sql, and IndexOptimize.sql. Then, create the following .sql file:

Declare @4wks datetime
set @4wks = DateAdd(hh, DateDiff(hh, 0, GETDATE()) – 672, 0)

EXECUTE [dbo].[IndexOptimize] @Databases = ‘ALL_DATABASES’, @OnlyModifiedStatistics = ‘Y’
EXECUTE [dbo].[DatabaseIntegrityCheck] @Databases = ‘ALL_DATABASES’

exec msdb.dbo.sp_delete_backuphistory @oldest_date = @4wks

IF (EXISTS (SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = ‘dbo’ AND TABLE_NAME = ‘CommandLog’))
BEGIN
DELETE FROM [dbo].[CommandLog] WHERE DATEDIFF(dd,StartTime,GETDATE()) > 30
END

IF @@SERVERNAME = ‘MYSBSSERVER\SBSMONITORING’
BEGIN
EXECUTE [SBSMonitoring].[dbo].[CleanupDatabase]
END

This can be called with sqlcmd in Task Scheduler.  (“sqlcmd -E -SmyServer -i c:\path\to\scriptname.sql”)

I’ve also started using Microsoft’s script to reindex SUSDB.  I migrated that into SQL Server, so it’s an actual job, but SBS doesn’t support migrating the SBSMonitoring database out of the SBSMonitoring 2005 Express instance that’s installed by default, hence the scripty maintenance.

You may recall that I’m serving up not only Windows Deployment Services capture and deploy but also Acronis recovery media over PXE.

Well, now I’m also serving up Windows Defender Offline. When chosen from the PXE boot menu, it boots into Windows PE, automagically launches Defender, updates the definitions, and runs a full scan.  And then sits there and waits for you to see the results and hit reboot.

Here’s what I did.  This assumes you have Windows Deployment Services and the Windows Automated Installation Kit.

1. Download Windows Defender Offline for your architecture.
2. Run the tool to create an ISO (“to burn to CD/DVD later”).
3. Mount the ISO with Virtual CloneDrive (or similar product).
4. Fish boot.wim out of /sources on the virtual CD drive.
5. Create a directory to mount the wim into if one doesn’t already exist.
6. Mount boot.wim into that directory. Dism /Mount-Wim /WimFile:C:\temp\boot.wim /MountDir:C:\temp\wim /Index:1
7. If you have a directory full of drivers for your environment, you can pre-emptively add them with: Dism /Image:C:\temp\wim /Add-Driver /Driver:c:\drivers /Recurse /ForceUnsigned. (If not, cross your fingers and carry on with the next step.)
8. Copy mpam-fex64.exe (or similarly named file for x86)  into the top level of the wim from the top level of your virtual CD drive.
9. Save and unmount the wim.  Dism /Unmount-Wim /MountDir:C:\temp\wim /Commit
10. Upload the new wim to your WDS server and add it as a boot option.

I’ve also rewritten a lot of my batch scripts to be PowerShell, but I think that’s a post for another day.