Virtually Jason

I recently wrote about a situation where I was creating a zoning configuration and had to figure out which fiber channel devices were active .  After we finished that project, we decided that we should go through and actually remove the inactive aliases and zones.  We had a list of active devices, so we were all ready to move forward and say "delete everything that isn't on this list!".  That'll work great, right? Of course not; we needed the opposite.  "Delete everything that is on this list" is a far better instruction that is way less likely to lead to painful mistakes.  Even better is "run these commands to delete all of these unnecessary objects" and I know one good way to generate such a list of commands: a script (I feel like I'm developing a battle-cry...). I put together a script that does a few basic things.  First, it uses the nsshow  command to get a list of all of the active WWNs on a given Brocade fiber switch.  Then, it compa...

A while back, I posted a quick script to create commands for  1:1 Zoning on a Brocade Fiber Switch .  I was recently helping someone go through that exact process on a set of switches that had a lot of aliases already defined on them.  Their challenge was that they weren't sure which aliases were for their current SAN vs. a retired SAN.  Rather than just creating zones for both SANs, I decided to put together a quick script that would scrape their current Aliases and check which ones have active WWNs currently in the system.  They could then use this information to prune the Aliases that are no longer needed, in addition to only creating the required zones for our project. In order to do this task, I had to do some quick string parsing into PowerShell objects .  Good thing I already know how to do that ;)  So, I put together this script which does two things: 1) It parses the Brocade Fiber Switch's configuration to look for any Aliases 2) It checks...

Every now and then, I find myself needing to use a utility like plink in order to interface with a system, such as a switch or a chassis, during a script.  If I'm just sending configuration commands (and am taking it on faith that they worked...), then it's nice and easy, but if I actually want to extract information from the device, then I've got a bit of a challenge, because those devices (via plink) are not going to give me back an object that PowerShell understands. For example, if I use get-vm in PowerShell, I will get back a vm object that has a bunch of properties, which I can easily access using dot notation.  If I use plink to pull a brocade switch configuration, all I'm going to get back (from PowerShell's perspective) is a great big long string with lots of New Line characters, tabs and spaces.  So, how do I extract data from a formatted text string, in order to more easily work with it in PowerShell?  Well, there's a lot of different tricks availab...