Month: February 2014

Backup MySQL Databases running on a Windows Server using Systems Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2012.

John Leave a comment

Running MySQL on a Windows machine is pretty straight forward.  One of the down sides though is that MySQL is not VSS aware and may mis-behave when back up software such as Data Protection Manager or ShadowProtect.  Data Protection Manager (DPM) has the ability (basically called Pre-Backup and Post-Backup Scripts) to perform actions before and after a backup run.

After installing the DPM Protection Agent onto the computer you want to run the protect (by default its %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM) You’ll find a Scripting Folder and inside a ScriptingConfig.xml file which should only contain XML Schema data, we will want to expand on this by adding the following lines inside ScriptConfiguration

   <DatasourceScriptConfig DataSourceName="Data source">
     ”Path\Script Parameters” 
     "Path\Script Parameters” 
     30

DataSourceName needs to be the name of the Data Source that you are protecting (matching in DPM Console) for example C:\MySQL_Backup and in our case we only want to use a PreBackupScript (ie C:\MySQL_Backup\BackupDB.cmd) which will dump a backup from our MySQL Databse into a single SQL file before the actual DPM Backup event.  As an example, the following will execute a backup for MySQL.  You will need to change -User -Password and the MaharaProd to something that suits your environment.

@echo off
set CurrentDate=%date:~-10,2%_%date:~7,2%_%date:~-4,4%
move /y C:\MySQL_Backup\Mahara-*.sql C:\MySQL_Backup\PreviousBackup.sql
mysqldump –user backupuser –password=changethis MaharaProd > C:\MySQL_Backup\Mahara-%CurrentDate%.sql

The above will output a Mahara-DD_MM_YYYY.sql file as well as make a Previous Backup before allowing DPM to go ahead and create the restore point.

Check out this TechNet article for more details on how to get this running.

Save Time by using CLI to Copy Command Output from HP switches to a TFTP Server

John Leave a comment

So I was recently doing some troubleshooting and needed to do a “show tech all” on a couple of our Switches to do some further analysis.  My usual way was to fire up PuTTY (or KiTTY which is an improved “fork” of Putty) and do a “show tech all” then manually copy and paste into a waiting notepad window to save the text file.

I recently found out there is a copy command that allows an administrator to copy a large number of configuration and logs files from a switch as well as a command-output option which allows an administrator to specify a CLI command to copy output of.  All you need to take advantage of this feature is an TFTP or SFTP server to copy the output to.  So a sample output to a TFTP server would be (where the IP address is your TFTP server and what ever filename you want to save the output as)

copy command-output "show tech all" tftp 172.16.20.57 show_tech_all.txt

After entering that in, you will see the switch perform the TFTP download with the output of the specified CLI command.  Once done, navigate to your TFTP (or SFTP) server Root Directory and you’ll have a show_tech_all.txt file ready to open in Notepad.  You can also do running config (swName# show run) and crash logs using the method above, just to TAB completion on the copy command to see what is available on your particular switch.

Generate Mailbox Size and Usage Report using PowerShell for Exchange 2010 / 2013

John 1 Comment

So I recently wanted to create a report to show us who was using up the most space on our mailbox servers, previous administrators had either done away for limits for mailboxes or had set them to be very very generous and our users weren’t really the ones to either keep their mailbox tidy or archive items away.

I knew the quick and easy solution would be powershell and then getting the output to either a CSV file or HTML.  So a bit of a look around TechNet for Get-MailboxStatistics got me the commands I needed, but what else could I select out of that.  After a bit more digging I found a list on MSDN for MailboxStatistics members which allowed me to extract exactly what I was after.  After putting all that together, I cam up with the following

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select DisplayName,
TotalItemSize,ItemCount,Database,LastLogonTime,LastLoggedOnUserAccount | Sort 
TotalItemSize -Descending | ConvertTo-Html -Title "Mailbox Stats"| 
Out-file "C:\MailboxStatistics.html"

That gave me a nice HTML page output, you could easily improve on this with colours depending on outputs from StorageLimitStatus or LastLogonTime where we found that some mailboxes hadn’t even been used.