I have been talking to Ariel last month, asking for a Microspotting T-Shirt since I had mentioned her earlier on my blog.

I have been on holiday in the meantime… but the T-Shirt had arrived and was waiting for me in my letterbox in the office !! How cool is that???

So today I am walking around the Rome office in it… and I am looking at people’s faces: you need to understand that Italian dress code is more or less the opposite of how people usually dress in Redmond… Italy is historically more formal, and it would be the norm to dress fancy… one would definitely look BAD here if he would show up in sandals in the office… and VERY bad going on sandals to a customer…

So this is a screenshot from my new Quad-Core Intel Q6600, 8GB RAM with Windows 2008 Enterprise x64, running Hyper-V.
I have bought it and installed it a few days ago, and migrated my home Active Directory off the old windows 2003 machine to Windows 2008. Yes, because I have an Active Directory at home. I know, I am probably nuts, but you already knew that much.

Today, I just updated Hyper-V to RTM version. Oh yeah, because Hyper-V has been Released To Manufacturing today! You can get it HERE.

I am having lot of fun with this. I had not bought a new PC in about 7 years and could not really test anything on that old one anymore…
I paid 8GB roughly 100euros, which is not a lot if you think about it. These days even standard "budget" PCs for just doing email and web surfing ship with 2 or 4GB…
With that amount of RAM, I expect it to last several years like the previous one. The one I bought 7 years ago had 512MB when everybody was buying 128 or 256MB. Kinda the same story here.

Wonder what happens to the old PC? That glorious machine that has been my server for years has now been converted to the new kids' PC and will go on for a few more years like that, I hope.

Not having one of the "supported" platforms pushed me into playing with the provided Management Packs, and in turn I managed to use the MP for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a base, and replaced a couple of strings in the discoveries in order to get a working CentOS 5 Management Pack.

I still have not looked into the "hardware" monitors and health model / service model, so those are not currently monitored. But it is a start.

A lot of people have asked me a lot of information and would like to get the file - both in the blog's comment, on the newsgroup, or via mail. I am sorry, but I cannot provide you with the file, because it has not been throughly tested and might render your systems unstable, and also because there might be licensing and copyright issues that I have not checked within Microsoft.

Keep also in mind that using CentOS as a monitored platform is NOT a SUPPORTED scenario/platform for SCX. I only used it because I did not have a Suse or Redhat handy that day, and because I wanted to understand how the Management Packs using WS-Man worked.

This said, should you wish to try to do the same "MP Hacking" I did,  I pretty much explained all you need to know in my previous post and its comments, so that should not be that difficult.

Actually, I still think that the best way to figure out how things are done is by looking at the actual implementation, so I encourage you to look at the management packs and figure out how those work. There are a few mature tools out there that will help you author/edit Management Packs if you don't want to edit the XML directly: the Authoring Console, and Silect MP Studio Lite, for example. If you want to delve in the XML details, instead, then I suggest you read the Authoring Guide and peek at Steve Wilson's AuthorMPs.com site.

Disclaimer
The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.

This post wants to describe my limited testing so far - I hope this can benefit/help everyone testing the beta for some stuff that might currently not be incredibly clear - unless you attended the MMS class, at least :-))

I started out with the White Paper that has been posted on the web, which describes the architecture pretty well, but from a higher level (with diagrams and the like). Then I downloaded the beta bits, which contain another document about setting the thing up. It is pretty well done, to be honest (especially if you consider that it is beta documentation for a beta product!), but it does not really go all the way down to troubleshooting things a lot, yet. I will try to cover some of that here.

I installed the agent manually - it’s just a RPM package, not much that can go wrong with that. There is a reason why I did not use the push discovery and deployment of the agent, which you will figure out reading later on. Once installed, I tried to figure out how things were looking like on the linux machine. It is all pretty understandable, after all, if you look around on the machine (documented or not, linux and open source stuff is easy to figure out by reading configuration files and the like, and by searching on the web).

Basically the “agent” is not properly an "agent" the way the windows agent is, since it does not really "sends" stuff to the Management Server on its own: It consists of a  couple of services/daemons, based on existing opensource projects, but configured in their own folder, with their own name, and using different ports than a standard install of those,  not to conflict with possible existing ones on those machines.

The Management Service uses these services remotely (similar to doing agentless monitoring towards a windows box) using these services. The two services are:

• scx-cimd which implements the CIM daemon (openpegasus.org)
• scx-wsmand which implements Ws-Man daemon (openwsman.org)

It is easy to figure out how they are layed out. Even if undocumented, you look at the processes

and you can figure out WHERE they live (/opt/microsoft/scx/bin/….) and where their configuration files are located (/etc/opt/microsoft/scx/conf …).

The files are self explanatory, and the documentation of the opensource projects can be found on the Internet: 

for wsmand

• at openwsman.org (for wsmand)

for cimd

• at openpegasus site (http://www.openpegasus.org/documents.tpl?CALLER=doc.tpl&dcat= )
• on the openpegasus wiki (http://wiki.opengroup.org/pegasus-wiki/doku.php?id=start )
• at the linux management IBM page http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/os-ltc-systemsmanagement/ 

I still have to delve into them properly as I would like to, but I already figured out a bunch of interesting things by quickly looking at them.

Agent Communication someone must have decided to “recycle” the 1270 port number that was used in MOM2005 Basically openwsman listens as a SSL listener (with basic auth – connected via PAM module with the “regular” unix /etc/passwd users, so you can authenticate as those without having to define specific users for the service). So all that happens is that the Management Server asks things/executes WS-Man queries and commands on this channel. The Management Server connects every time to the agent on port 1270 using SSL, authenticates as “root” (or as the specified "Action Account") and does its stuff, or asks the agent to do it. So the communication is happening from the Management Server to the agent… not the other way around like it happens with Windows "agents". That’s why it feels to me more like an “agentless” thing, at least for what concerns the “direction” of traffic and who does the actual querying.

For the rest, the provided Management Packs have “normal” discoveries and “normal” monitors. Pretty much like the Windows Management Packs often discover thing by querying WMI, here they use WS-Man to run CIM queries against the Unix boxes.

The Service Model is totally cool to actually *SEE* in action, don’t you think so ?

A few more debugging/troubleshooting information:

I searched a bit and found the openwsman.org documentation and forum to be useful to figure some things out. For example I banged my head a few times before managing to actually TEST a query from windows to linux using WINRM. This document helped a lot.

Of course you have to solve some other things such as DNS resolution AND trusting the self-issued certificates that the agent uses, first. Once you have done that, you can run test queries from the Windows box towards the Unix ones by using WinRM.

For example, this is how I tested what the discovery for a Linux RedHat Computer type should be returning (I read that by opening the MP in authoring console, as one would usually do for any MP):

winrm enumerate http://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/SCX_OperatingSystem?__cimnamespace=root/scx -username:root -password:password -r:https://centos:1270/wsman -auth:basic

If you need to test the query directly *ON* the linux box (querying the CIMD instead than WSMAND), the WBEMEXEC utility is packaged with the agent (under /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools ). It is not as easy as some windows administrators (that have used WBEMTEST or WMI Tools in the past) would hope, but not even that bad. Just to run a few queries to the CIM daemon locally it is not really interactive, so you need to create a XML file that looks like the following (basically you build the RAW request the way the CIMD accepts it):

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<CIM CIMVERSION="2.0" DTDVERSION="2.0">

<MESSAGE ID="50000" PROTOCOLVERSION="1.0">

<SIMPLEREQ>

<IMETHODCALL NAME="EnumerateInstanceNames">

<LOCALNAMESPACEPATH>

<NAMESPACE NAME="root"/>

<NAMESPACE NAME="scx"/>

</LOCALNAMESPACEPATH>

<IPARAMVALUE NAME="ClassName">

<CLASSNAME NAME="SCX_OperatingSystem"/>

</IPARAMVALUE>

</IMETHODCALL>

</SIMPLEREQ>

</MESSAGE>

</CIM>

Once you have made such a file, you can execute the query in the file with the tool like the following:

As you can see from here, CIMD uses HTTP already. This differs from Windows' WMI that uses RPC/DCOM. In a way, this is much simpler to troubleshoot, and more firewall-friendly.

I have not really found an activity or debug log for any of those components, yet… but in the end they are not doing anything ON THEIR OWN, unless asked by the MS…. So the “healthservice” logic is all on the MS anyway. Errors about failed discoveries, permissions of the Action Account user, and anything else will be logged by the HealthService on the Windows machine (the Management Server) that is actually performing monitoring towards the Unix box.

It really is *just* getting the WMI and WinRM-equivalent layer on linux/Unix up and running– after that, everything is done from windows anyway!

After this common management infrastructure has been provided, 3^rd parties will be facilitated in writing *just* MPs, without having to worry about the TRANSPORT of information anymore.

As you have probably noticed from the screenshots and commandlines, I don’t have a “real” Redhat Enterprise Linux or “supported” linux distribution… Therefore I started my testing using CentOS 5 (which is very similar to RHEL 5) - the agent installed fine as you can see, but I was not getting anything really “discovered” - the MP had only found a “linux computer” but was not finding any “RedHat” or “SuSe” or any other "Operating System" instances… and if you are somewhat familiar with the way Operations Manager targeting works, you would understand that monitors are targeted at object classes. If I don't have any instance of those objects being discovered, NO MONITORING actually happens, even if the infrastructure is in place and the pieces are talking to each other:

Therefore my machine was not being monitored.

In the end, I actually even got it to work, but I had to create a new Management Pack (exporting and modifying the RHEL5 one as a base) that would actually search for different Property values and discover CentOS instead as if it were RedHat:

After importing my hacked Management Pack the machine started to be monitored. Here you can see Health Explorer in all of its glory:

Of course this is a hack I made just to have a test setup somewhat working and to familiarize myself with the SCX components. It is not guaranteed that my Management pack actually works on CentOS the way it is supposed to work and that there aren't other - more subtle - differences between RedHat and CentOS that will make it fail. I only modified a couple of Discoveries to let it discover the "Operating System" instance… everything else should follow, but not necessarily. One difference you see already in the screenshot above is that I am not yet seeing the hardware being monitored, so my hack is already only partially working and it is definitely something that won't be supported, so I cannot provide it here. Also, this is a beta, so I I think that the Management Packs will be re-released with following beta versions, and this change is something that would need to be re-done all over again. Also, the unsupported distribution is the reason why I installed the agent manually in the first place, as the "Discovery Wizard" would not really "agree" to go and let me install the agent remotely on an unsupported "platform!".

But I could not wait to see this working, while waiting two business days (we are on a weekend!) for confirmation that I am allowed to actually download a 30-day-unsupported-Trial of the "real" RedHat Enteprise Linux, so I cheated

Disclaimer

The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS INFORMATION.

"[...] What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It's hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. [...]"

In fact, being made by Microsoft people or not, the list of open source software on CodePlex keeps growing too. Mentioning CodePlex and interviews, another interesting one is that of Sara Ford, Program Manager for CodePlex posted on Microspotting. But Microspotting is awesome in general. My favorite quote by her:

"[...] Hey. My name is Ariel and I'm the person you thought would never work at MSFT [...]".

In fact, just as I do, she is running that blog on Wordpress, posting her photos on Flickr, using a RSS feed on Feedburner and in general using a bunch of things that are out there that might be seen as "competing" with what Microsoft makes. In fact, this attitude towards other products and vendors on the market is what I am mainly interested in. Should we only use flagship products? Sure, when they help us, but not necessarily. Who cares? People's blogs are not, as someone would like them to be, a coordinated marketing effort. This is about real people, real geeks, who just want to share and communicate personal ideas and thoughts. I had a blog before being at Microsoft, after all. Obviously I had exposure to competing products. My server was running LAMP on Novell Netware in 2002 - after which I moved it to Linux. It is not a big deal. And if I try to put things in perspective, in fact, this is turning out to be an advantage. I am saying this, as the latest news about interoperability comes from MMS (Microsoft Management Summit): and that is the announcement that System Center Operations Manager will monitor Linux natively. I find this to be extremely exciting, and a step in the right direction… to say it all I am LOVING this!!! But at the same time I see some other colleagues in technical support that are worrying and being scared by this - "if we do monitor Linux and Unix, we are supposed to have at least some knowledge on those systems", they are asking. Right. We probably do. At the moment there are probably only a limited number of people that actually can do that, at least in my division. But this is because in the past they must have sacrificed their own curiosity to become "experts" in some very narrow and "specialized" thing. Here we go. On the opposite, I kept using Linux - even when other "old school" employees would call me names. All of a sudden, someone else realizes my advantage.  …but a lot of geeks already understood the power of exploration, and won't stop defining people by easy labels. Another cool quote I read the other day is what Jimmy Schementi has written in his Flickr profile:

"[...] I try to do everything, and sometimes I get lucky and get good at something [...]".

Reading on his blog it looks like he also gave up on trying to write a Twitter plugin for MSNLive Messenger (or maybe he never tried, but at least I wanted to do that, instead) and wrote it for Pidgin instead.  Why did he do that ? I don't know, I suppose because it was quicker/easier - and there were API's and code samples to start from.

The bottom line, for me, is that geeks are interested in figuring out cool things (no matter what language or technology they use) and eventually communicating them. They tend to be pioneers of technologies. They try out new stuff. Open Source development is a lot about agility and "trying out" new things. Another passage of Brad's interview says:

"[...] That's true–the open source projects I contribute to tend to be the "by developer, for developer" kind, although I also consume things that are less about development [...] Like one tool that I've used forever is the GIMP graphics editor, which I love a lot".

That holds true, when you consider that a lot of these things are not really mainstream. Tools made "by developer, for developer" are usually a sort of experimental ground. Like Twitter. Every geek is talking about Twitter these days, but you can't really say that it is mainstream. Twitter has quite a bunch of interesting aspects, though, and that's why geeks are on it. Twitter lets me keep up-to-date quicker and better (and with a personal, conversational touch) even better than RSS feeds and blogs do. Also, there are a lot of Microsofties on Twitter. And the cool thing is that yo can really talk to everybody, at any level. Not just everybody "gets" blogs, social networks, and microblogging. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be on top of the tech news, or use experimental technologies. So in a way stuff like Twitter is "by geeks, for geeks" (not really just for developers - there's a lot of "media" people on Twitter). Pretty much in the same way, a lot of people I work with (at direct contact, everyday) only found out about LinkedIN during this year (2008!). I joined Orkut and LinkedIN in 2004. Orkut was in private beta, back then. A lot of this stuff never becomes mainstream, some does. But it is cool to discover it when it gets born. How long did it take for Social Networking to become mainstream? So long that when it is mainstream for others, I have seen it for so long that I am even getting tired of it.

For some reason, geeks love to be pioneers. This is well expressed in a digression by Chris Pratley:

"[...] some of them we will be putting out on officelabs.com for the general public (you folks!) to try so we can understand how "normal" people would use these tools. Now of course, as we bloggers and blog-readers know, we're not actually normal - you could even debate whether the blogosphere is more warped than the set of Microsoft employees, who comprise an interesting cross-section of job types, experiences, and cultures. But I digress. [...]"

But I have been digressing, too, all along. As usual.

Installed moonlight on Ubuntu from source by following these instructions (there are some typo's but they are understandable and correctable).

All in all, even being still under heavy development, what Miguel de Icaza has achieved (with moonlight, just like with mono) is amazing.

After I posted the above picture on Flickr, John Montgomery was amazed to see PopFly (his creature) working on moonlight, and he linked to me from his blog.

When I end up having conversations such as this, I get really sad: I thought we had finally passed the arrogant period where we had to spoon-feed customers, and I thought we were now mature enough to consider them smart people and providing cool, empowering technologies for them to use. I also thought that pretty much everybody liked Microsoft finally opening up and actually talking TO people… not only talking them INTO buying something, something - but having real conversations.

I get sad when I find that people still don't seem to be accepting that, and wanting back the old model, instead. Kinda weird.

The conversation goes as follows (words are not exactly those - we were speaking Italian and I sort of reconstructed the conversation - you should get the sense of it anyway):

[...]

Me: "The SDK service allows you to do quite a lot of cool stuff. Unfortunately not all of that functionality is completely or always easily exposed in the GUI. That is, for example: it is very EASY to define overrides, but it can get very tricky to find them back once set. That's why you can use this little useful tool that the developer of that SDK service has posted on his blog…"

Cust: "…but we can't just read blogs here and there!"

Me: "Well, I mean, then you may have to wait for the normal release cycle. It might be that those improvements will make it in to the product. That might happen in months, if you are lucky, or maybe never. What's wrong if he publishes that on his blog, bypassing the bureaucracy crap, and makes your life easier with it RIGHT NOW?"

Cust: "It is not official, I want it in the product!"

Me: "I see, and even understand that. But right now that feature just isn't there. But you can use this tool to have it. Don't worry: it is not made by some random guy who wants to trojan your server! It is made by the very same developer who wrote the product itself…"

Cust: "It is not supported, what if it breaks something?"

Me: "So are all resource kit tools, in general. written by some dev guy in his free five minutes, and usually unsupported. Still very useful, though. Most of them. And they usually do work, you know that much, don't you?"

Cust: "But why on a blog?"

Me: "What's wrong with this? People are just trying to make customer's life easier by being transparent and open and direct in their communication, just talking RIGHT to the customers. People talking to people, bypassing the prehistoric bureaucracy structure of companies… the same happens on many other sites, just think isatools.org for example… those are just tools that a support guy like me has written and wants to share because they might be useful…"

Cust: "But I can't follow/read all the blogs out there! I don't have time for it"

Me: "Why not? I have thousands of feeds in my aggregator and…"

Cust: "I don't have time and I don't want to read them, because I pay for support, so I don't expect this stuff to be in blogs"

Me: "Well, I see, since you pay for support, you are paying ME - in fact I am working with you on this product precisely as part of that paid support. That's why I am here to tell you that this tool exists, in case you had not heard of it, so you actually know about it without having to read that yourself on any blog… does that sound like a deal? Where's the issue?"

Cust: "Sgrunt. I want something official, I don't like this blog stuff"

[...]

I thought this was particularly interesting, not because I want to make fun of this person. I do respect him and I think he just has a different point of view. But in my opinion this conversation shows (and made me think about) an aspect of that "generation gap" inside Microsoft that Hugh talks about here:

"[...]4.30 Hugh talks about a conversation he had with a few people inside Microsoft- how there’s a generation gap growing within the company, between the Old Guard, and the new generation of Microsofties, who see their company in much more open, organic terms.[...]"

Basically this tells me that the generation gap is not happening only INSIDE Microsoft: it invests our customers too. Which makes it even more difficult to talk to some of them, as we change. Traditions are hard to change.

I am seriously considering giving Asirra a try. It is an interesting project from Microsoft Research for an HIP (Human Interaction Proof) that uses info from petfinder.com to let users set apart pictures of dogs from those of cats. There is also a WordPress plugin, in the best and newest "we want to interoperate" fashion that we are finally getting at Microsoft (this has always been the way to go, IMHO, and BTW).

Anyway, what do you think ?

#Number of Alerts per day

$alerttimes = Get-Alert | Select-Object TimeRaised
$array=@()

foreach ($datetime in $alerttimes){
$array += $datetime.timeraised.date
}

$array | Group-Object Date

#Number of Events per day

$eventtimes = Get-Event | Select-Object TimeGenerated
$array=@()

foreach ($datetime in $eventtimes){
$array += $datetime.timegenerated.date
}

$array | Group-Object Date

Beware that these "queries" might take a long time to execute (especially the events one) depending on the amount of data and your retention policy.

This is of course just scratching the surface of the amount of amazing things you can do with Powershell in Operations Manager 2007. For this kind of information you might want to keep an eye on the official "System Center Operations Manager Command Shell" blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/scshell/

I just created an account for myself on the site… as you know I like PowerShell, so even if I usually prefer writing stuff in english, I will try to hang out there and see how can I contribute to it.

After all, I am italian…

Simply Works, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

I don't know about other people, but I do get a lot to think when the end of the year approaches: all that I've done, what I have not yet done, what I would like to do, and so on…

And it is a period when memories surface.

I found the two old CD-ROMs you can see in the picture. And those are memories.
missioncritical software was the company that invented a lot of stuff that became Microsoft's products: for example ADMT and Operations Manager.

The black CD contains SeNTry, the "enterprise event manager", what later became Operations Manager.
On the back of the CD, the company motto at the time: "software that works simply and simply works".
So true. I might digress on this concept, but I won't do that right now.

I have already explained in my other blog what I do for work. Well, that was a couple of years ago anyway. Several things have changed, and we are moving towards offering services that are more measurable and professional. So, since it happens that in a certain job you need to be an "expert" and "specialize" in order to be "seen" or "noticed".
You know I don't really believe in specialization. I have written it all over the place. But you need to make other people happy as well and let them believe what they want, so when you "specialize" they are happier. No, really, it might make a difference in your carrer

In this regard, I did also mention my "meeting again" with Operations Manager.
That's where Operations manager helped me: it let me "specialize" in systems and applications management… a field where you need to know a bit of everything anyway: infrastructure, security, logging, scripting, databases, and so on…
This way, everyone wins.

Don't misunderstand me, this does not mean I want to know everything. One cannot possibly know everything, and the more I learn the more I believe I know nothing at all, to be honest. I don't know everything, so please don't ask me everything - I work with mainframes
While that can be a great excuse to avoid neighbours and relatives annoyances with their PCs though, on the serious side I still believe that any intelligent individual cannot be locked into doing a narrow thing and know only that one bit just because it is common thought that you have to act that way.

If I would stop where I have to stop I would be the standard "IT Pro". I would be fine, sure, but I would get bored soon. I would not learn anything. But I don't feel I am the standard "IT Pro". In fact, funnily enough, on some other blogs out there I have been referenced as a "Dev" (find it on your own, look at their blogrolls :-)). But I am not a Dev either then… I don't write code for work. I would love to, but I rarely actually do, other than some scripts. Anyway, I tend to escape the definition of the usual "expert" on something… mostly because I want to escape it. I don't see myself represented by those generalization.

As Phil puts it, when asked "Are software developers - engineers or artists?":

"[...] Don’t take this as a copout, but a little of both. I see it more as craftsmanship. Engineering relies on a lot of science. Much of it is demonstrably empirical and constrained by the laws of physics. Software is less constrained by physics as it is by the limits of the mind. [...]"

Craftmanship. Not science.
And stop calling me an "engineer". I am not an engineer. I was even crap in math, in school!

Anyway, what does this all mean? In practical terms, it means that in the end, wether I want it or not, I do get considered an "expert" on MOM and OpsMgr… and that I will mostly work on those products for the next year too. But that is not bad, because, as I said, working on that product means working on many more things too. Also, I can point to different audiences: those believing in "experts" and those going beyond schemes. It also means that I will have to continue teaching a couple of scripting classes (both VBScript and PowerShell) that nobody else seems to be willing to do (because they are all *expert* in something narrow), and that I will still be hacking together my other stuff (my facebook apps, my wordpress theme and plugins, my server, etc) and even continue to have strong opinions in those other fields that I find interesting and where I am not considered an *expert*

Well, I suppose I've been ranting enough for today…and for this year
I really want to wish everybody again a great beginning of 2008!!! What are you going to be busy with, in 2008 ?

This is much more sysadmin-oriented than what was availble before (that remais of course still relevant, but more from a Management Pack developer's point of view, who wants to know how things work "behind the hood").

But in my blog I don't require or need people to actually log in to do anything. I actually like anonymous/free comment. A CAPTCHA takes care of spammers and I am fine with it so far. Probably for a big site with a lot of users it might make sense, but for my blog so far it doesn't. But there's one thing for which this is instead useful: I have always been worried, when logging in through HTTP (thus, without SSL) to my blog from networks I don't manage or completely trust, that my password could be sniffed over the wire and stolen. Live ID solves my problem by letting Microsoft validate my identity: I have associated my Live ID to the blog's main user account(=myself), the one writing this post. So the plugin in its current form is used as a replacement of the login form (the standard wp-login.php wordpress form CAN still be used if you like, of course, you just don't HAVE to. Also the use of xmlrpc will still require local user/pwd combination.). Anyway, this new form will authenticate you thorugh Live ID and then check if your Live ID is associated to any local user. If it is, it will log you on to wordpress with that account. Otherwise it will inform you that you are successfully logged on to passport Live, but unfortunately there is no corresponding local account for you, and that it would need to be set up. Setting it up is as difficult as adding a line to the database… probably adding a form or a property page would be nice, but in my case I just did it with a query:

INSERT INTO `wordpress`.`wp-usermeta` (
`umeta_id` ,
`user_id` ,
`meta_key` ,
`meta_value`
)
VALUES (
NULL , '1', 'LiveID', 'f11fa1d3e82c68776f94a3a5c459b70b'
);

which adds an extra "property" for the first user (admin) called 'LiveID' which contains your Live ID (the one above is not my real one, in case you were wondering). When you are authenticated by LiveID and you get back this value, the plugin checks in this table which WordPress userid in the database has been associated with this Live ID and - if it finds one - it authenticates you as that user. Of course you should not have duplicates.

My code is mostly based on the SDK PHP Sample, with some modification to integrate it in WordPress as a plugin. Of course I removed the file that is used as "user database" and used wordpress DB instead.

There's a ton of things that could be improved. I just did not put any more effort and time in it. As you might know if you read this blog, I am not a full time developer. Actually I shouldn't write code at all for work and I am mainly considered an "infrastructure" guy. Anyway, I would like to code more and even if I am not supposed to, I always try to find stimulating situations that require a bit of integration, thinking out of the box, some scripting, etc…

[updated: november 3rd 2007] You can download the sample plugin "AS-IS" here: liveauth.zip . This has only been tested and only works with Wordpress 2.3.x serie (but should also work with earlier versions - not tested)

[updated: march 30th 2008] Wordpress 2.5 has changed the way the authentication cookie is generated, therefore here is an updated version of the plugin that works with the new secure cookies: liveauth02.zip
I should really invest some more time in this and clear up the code. I should also make an interface to make the configuration easier, and maybe make a version that works on both 2.3 and 2.5 branches. I am not sure when I will have time for that, though…

[updated: april 20th 2008] I have released version 0.3c of the plugin which now finally includes a simple configuration page, and should work on both WordPress 2.3 (and older) and on the 2.5 brach. Please visit the new Windows Live ID Authentication WordPress Plugin Page.

Disclaimer:
The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.

In the end it turns out that I did not have to wait or be worried, since the cat was already out of the bag!!!

[As a side note, it happens a lot of times that stuff gets public much earlier than when I actually read that internally. In those internal communication it very often is still considered "confidential" when the whole world is speaking about it.... I don't get this whole "confidentiality" thing in these days of porous membranes...]

Scott Guthrie writes:

"[...] One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. [...] VS 2008 will include support to automatically retrieve the appropriate .NET Framework source files on demand from Microsoft. This means that the source code for the ASP.NET GridView and BaseDataBoundControl classes above do not have to already be installed on the machine before we started the debugger. Instead, when we use F11 to step into their implementation VS can automatically download the source files from Microsoft and open it within the IDE. [...]"

WOW. This is so cool, and a further step in the right direction.

Thanks to Alessandro for having picked this up, as I read it on his blog, and I thought it was an information worth spreading!!!

Ubuntu on Virtual PC 2007, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This was a VMWare "virtual appliance" with Ubuntu that I was using for testing. As I mostly use Virtual PC or Virtual Server, I found it annoying having to switch to VMWare player to use that specific machine, and I could not be asked to install a new one. So I converted the .VMDK to .VHD format (the other way around than it is described on this article ).

After that, I had to change GRUB's configuration to inform it that the SCSI disk (/dev/sda1) was all of a sudden become an IDE one (/dev/hda1), and then I also had to reconfigure X.

After that it runs like a charme!!!

I used to have Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Messenger on my Windows 2003 Server box. Now, this new fantastic integrated setup says it won't install on this operating system. Ridiculous. You read the release notes, and in fact it only says Windows XP and Vista.

I see.

Well, I happen to use a Windows 2003 Server at home - the same machine for day to day use (like writing this post or checking private email) and doing some study/testing. I don't have loads of machines. I don't actually have money for a new machine (even if I would really need a new one to test stuff).
I try to do more with less.

Well, if this does not install, what am I supposed to do ?
I want to chat with people, which means I'll keep using Pidgin on this machine. That way I also have my GTalk, ICQ and Yahoo buddies all in one place. And it eats up much less memory that the "real" live messenger. And without advertisements. How nice.

I am sorry when my employer does this kind of stupid things. This is not interoperability. It does not even work on OUR operating systems!

As for Windows Live Writer, read Phil's post. It seems like FrontPage, all over again.
For writing this post I've used Flickr.
Since I happen to post quite a bunch of photos or images on my blog, I find it ideal. The ONLY thing Flickr is missing, when used as a blogging tool, is the ability to post tags/categories too. Otherwise it would be perfect.

[...] I've been pushing the idea that every app should be a platform for a long time, that in addition to a user interface, every app should have a programmatic interface. For me the idea came from growing up using Unix in the 70s, where every app is a toolkit and the operating system is a scripting language. Wiring things together is an integral part of being a Unix user. It's why programmers like Unix so much [...]

It is entirely true. The limits are blurry, IMHO. In the Unix world it is common to find full-fledged "applications" which have been written by the ground up by people that were doing SysAdmin tasks, and those "applications" are usually just… scripts. Simple shell scripts, or something more evolved (PERL, PHP, Python) it does not really matter.

I am so tired of the division traditionally made in the Microsoft world between "Developers" and "IT Professionals". We even have separate sites for the two audiences: MSDN and Technet. There are separate "TechED" events: for"Devs" and for "IT Pros". There are blogs that are divided among the two "audiences"…

There aren't two different audiences, really. There are people, with various degrees of expertise. There is no such a thing as a "developer" if he doesn't know a bit how the underlying system works. His code is gonna suck. And there is not such a thing such a "IT Pro" that builds and integrates and manages systems if he does not have the palest idea of how things work "behind the GUI". He's gonna screw things up regardless of how many step-by-step (click-by-click ?) procedures you spoon feed him.

That's why automation and integration are best done by people who know how to write a bit code.

The PowerShell folk GET IT.

[...] Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion) [...]

Tafiti, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

www.tafiti.com/#p=0&q=%22Daniele%20Muscetta%22

Try it out.

Windows Live ID Team has published on the web the SDK that lets you liveID (or "passport")-enable your applications!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676633.aspx

There are even code samples in six different languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby e Perl! You can download them from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91761

Wow! Having time, it would be cool to write a Wordpress plugin using Passport authentication to authenticate/identify users that want to comment… mumble mumble…..

Interoperability. Wow.

More info at the Live ID starting Page: http://dev.live.com/blogs/liveid/archive/2006/05/18/8.aspx

Anyway, the post goes about Microsoft Surface. Which is something really cool. Eileen goes saying that she's worried if her cat would jump on the touch-screen table doing some damage to her information / data /accounts…. when I first saw the technology presented, I actually thought sort of the same thing…. what about my son going to the table with his hands dirty of chocolate paste ?? I have blogged in the past about the danger he poses…

Since kids these days do use the computers, having to replace keyboards because they are full of biscuits'crumbles or because they spilled fruit juice on them is quite common. Just less expensive than the special touch-screen, at the moment….

We are running several projects and activities together and, among several other things, he's in the process of migrating his users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. In this infrastructure, he has some ISA Server that publish both the Exchange2003 and the Exchange2007 frontends.

Now he wanted to know HOW MANY and WHICH ONES of his users actually have a PocketPC or other WIndows Mobile device and were actively connecting to the old FrontEnd. You give out mobile devices to people but those things are usually less "managed" - when compared to corporate PCs, at least. So you loose a bit control of the thing… usually people with mobile devices using ActiveSync in companies are managers, and especially since some of them might be on holiday at the moment, it was important to know WHO were the people that had to be told to reconfigure their device to point to the new name/server BEFORE he would start complaining about ActiveSync not working anymore…

So how do you figure out who's connecting ?

I am NO Exchange expert whatsoever… but a thing that came in handy was the thing that an ISA Server was reverse-publishing the frontend server. I know ISA (and firewalls/proxies in general) much better than Exchange, so I can help on that side. In the log files, ActiveSync Connections looked like the following URL, passing most parameters in the POST request: http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DeviceID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla (and on an unrelated note: yes, if you try to crawl this link, you are a bot :-))

So we exported ISA logs (there are several tools for this, including "Extract logs", but we did not use a script, we just used a filter for the correct publishing rule in the "Monitoring - Logging" tag in ISA Server Console and then copied and pasted those log lines) and tried to see if PowerShell could help tackle the issue.

Here we load our sample log (in a real log you would have much more information - each single line wrapping several console rows; I cut it short to the URL to make it more readable.

PS> get-content log.txt    

http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Gino&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Gino&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Antonio&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla
http://www.company.com/exchange?User=Mario&DevideID=186hkjw6gjw76463uh2g5gi2j3h&Bla=bla

We know Get-Content does not just display the file, it loads the file into a string array.

So we can cycle through the file and try to extract (using a regexp) the string after "User=" and before the first ampersand ("&"), which translates in the following regular expression:

"User=(?<nome>.*?)&"

(the regexp has been the most difficult thing to figure out, but it is very worth the hassle once you've done it…)

PS> get-content log.txt | foreach {$_ -match "User=(?<nome>.*?)&" | out-null; $matches}
Name                           Value
----                           -----
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario& nome                           Gino
0                              User=Gino&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Gino
0                              User=Gino&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Antonio
0                              User=Antonio&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&
nome                           Mario
0                              User=Mario&

This seems to work. Now we only have to get the Named Captures called "nome" (containing the user name):

PS> get-content log.txt | foreach {$_ -match "User=(?<name>.*?)&" | out-null; $matches["name"]}
Mario
Gino
Antonio Antonio
Gino
Antonio
Antonio
Mario
Mario
Mario
Mario
Antonio
Antonio
Mario
Antonio
Antonio
Mario
Antonio
Antonio
Mario
Antonio
Antonio
Mario
Mario

Awesome. Now sort them and remove duplicates. Which is one more command in our pipeline:

get-content log.txt | foreach {$_ -match "User=(?<nome>.*?)&" | out-null; $matches["nome"]} | sort-object -uniq

P> get-content log.txt | foreach {$_ -match "User=(?<name>.*?)&" | out-null; $matches["name"]} | sort-object -uniq
Antonio
Gino
Mario     

PS>
PS>

Now you can call those three users and tell them to modify their ActiveSync configuration

The layout is still crap, but I sort of like it being so light weight, so that is not on my priority list so far. Moreover, I am a crap designer.

Before that, tough, I still have to add important functionalities like the possibility to POST comments (which needs a new CAPTCHA, etc, so it will take me a while), and I am having issues with text encoding (it does not show the accented characters properly, yet).

But I am having fun doing it.

So I figured out it was possible to remove the subscription (from the Tools menu -> Account Settings -> RSS Feeds) but the folders were left there. Now, I didn't want to have those 500 folders in my mailbox, and I did not even want to die by right-clicking, pressing "delete", confirming…. all of this 500 times! No way.

So I wrote this little PowerShell script, I guess it *might* be helpful to someone at one stage, who knows ?

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook')
$oApp = New-Object -COM 'Outlook.Application'
$rss = $oApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder("olFolderRssFeeds")
forach ($folder in $rss.Folders)
{
$folder.Delete()
}

Please note that if you don't have the Office Interop Assemblies installed on your machine, you can't use the first line. As a result, you will have to change the third line hardcoding the number that represents the RSSFeeds folder, so it would become:

$rss = $oApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(25)

Note: I found out (later, of course) that there is a much more general post on this subject (that is, automating Outlook through PowerShell): http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/GettingThingsDoneOutlookTaskAutomationWithPowerShell.aspx

You can build complex web-mashups in minutes.

Read on an interesting review at programmableweb.com and, obviously, more info at the official site http://www.popfly.ms