Powershell for Printer Information from Windows 2008

While working on migrating are campus print server to Windows 2008 R2 64 bit I wrote some Powershell scripts I figured others may find useful. I have other scripts I'll post in the future on creating and working with printers but this post is primarily about getting data about the printers and ports.

The end result is are three excel files (CSV).

1. Contains all the information about the printers on the server.
2. Contains the Ports information and tries to ping the Host Address to see if the port is valid
3. Joins the data so that you can see the printer and its port information all together.

All the data is gathered via WMI so you'll need administrative access to the server your running it against. I used PowerGUI to write and test this and have been quite happy with the outcome. Considering our server has 500 printers on it takes about 5 minutes to run but lower numbers of printers run much faster.

The fact that the scripts pings all the ports and reports their status is a feature I should of written a long time ago.

Command Line Output

Picutre of the resulting Files

Download Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility (SUU)

Ever have one of those tasks that you figure will take 10 minutes but ends up taking your entire morning day. I did this morning when last night the front display on one of our Dell R900 VMware ESX hosts reported a problem with a CPU. Just a warning but it needed addressing. I put the ESX Host in maintenance mode and starting to research the issue. Multiple websites say that just upgrading the firmware and bios should take care of the issue. Either way its good practice usually.

Now remember for the rest of the post my only goal was to update the firmware and bios of a Dell R900.

Downloading the Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility


First things first I decide to do is optain the newest Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility DVD. I search both Google and Dell and look for the main site but they refuse to give a product page link from their support site. The last time I used it was at version SUU 6.4 but just try proving that is the latest version. Dell says "For the latest version, go to http://support.dell.com and search on 'SUU' " but Dell seems to keep returning  links to 2008's version. There is this link here which will take you to the manual but god forbid there a be download link. Finally I find a useful post here on DellTechCenter which sorta works.

Whats really funny is the post even says that google analytics shows searches for "OpenManage Download" were top searches for the entire site yet there still isn't a clear product page with the versions. Instead the post has you search their FTP for the latest. DellTechCenter has you use naviagate to ftp://ftp.dell.com/sysman using FileZilla. Sort the Files there and download the highest version of omxxx_suu_xxx.iso.xxx. Note that they are really large files (1.8gig each) so this takes a while; as in hours. Also note that its much better to use a ftp client like FileZilla to download these files rather than the http site which may introduce errors into files this large ( read below for checksum)

Dell FTP for SUU

After the files have finished downloading you have to combine the files together together. On windows this is done by opening a command prompt to the folder of the files and then execute the following. First be sure to change the file names if you are

Dell System Update Utility is already running

So after a failed run of the Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility I found that I couldn't rerun the update. You can read my other post as to how this occured and how to download and run SUU. The error I was getting when trying to run SUU was as follows, and since I had just rebooted I knew no other instances were running.

[root@nkuvmhost4 cdrom]# sh suu -e
Another instance of SUU is already running. Hence exiting SUU application.....
If you are sure, no other instance is currently running on this system, then please refer
"Frequently Asked Questions" section in the user guide on how to start SUU

The cause was a file "/var/log/dell/suu/suu.lck" however deleteing this file was unsucesful even with "rm -f suu.lck".The reason it couldn't be renamed, moved or deleted was because is was being protected using extended file system 'i' attribute.

cd /var/log/dell/suu
lsattr suu.lck
----i-------- suu.lck

You can remove this with "chattr -i". Now you can remove the file like you would normally with "rm -f" with out any further issue.

chattr -i suu.lck
rm -f  suu.lck

Links
How to delete a write protected file

VMware ESX URB timed Out

Working with Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) 5 I ran into an issue where I got a URB warning from Vmware ESX 4.1 was booted.

Message : cpu6:4263)URB timed out - USB device may not respond

VMware ESX URB timed out

(Disregard the be2net line as that is part of the beta drivers we're running on our Emulex cards.)

This problem popped up after using the Virtual Media mapping done via the DRAC 5. I tried to set the Virtual Media to be detatched however that didn't resolve the issue.

Looking around I found this VMware Forum post talking about the issue may be fixed with a firmware update.I was running DRAC 5 firmware 1.51 and downloaded 1.60 from Dell's DRAC 5 Firmware Download. I choose the Hard drive option and

Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC) 5 ActiveX Install Loop

I ran into this issue trying to mount a large ISO I couldn't burn to media on a Dell Remote Access Card version 5. It occurred using both Internet Explore 9 and 8.  I tried to open the Media tab and map the ISO. However when I loaded the tab it prompts to install a Dell Add on (ActiveX) and gives the following error : "Description: The Virtual Media plug-in is not installed or running."

DRAC 5 ActiveX Install Prompt

I right clicked and installed the add-on only to have it log me out of the DRAC. Figuring it installed and just needed a reload the site I log back in and go back to the media tab. I see exactly the same prompt and exactly the same error.

The easy fix is to

Pharos UniPrint - "Not enough money to print job"

On our new Pharos UniPrint 8.1 system a new error appeared today. "Not enough money to print job". I first figured this was a message I had written in the Pharos billing Plug-in. But looking closer I found that this message wasn't one I had written. and it appeared before my Plug-In "PrintJob -Accept Costs" was called. 

Pharos Not enough Money to print job

The issue only happened when a user had some money in internal balances and then the rest on the gateway balance. I narrowed it down to a feature that when Pharos Billing Plug-In was called the PlugIn.Balance was returned. If the balance wasn't enough the Pharos Popup not enough money to print job appeared. This all makes since but i'd been using the same Billing script in Pharos UniPrint 8.0.

The problem was actually how Pharos UniPrint 8.1 parsed

MBRAlign of Vmware on IBM N Series (Netapp)

We use a IBM N-Series array (read as: Netapp without the useful software yet comes with painful IBM support) and are experiencing horrific performance. As part of the blame game IBM pointed the finger at a few Vmware Virtual Machines that where misaligned then hung up. Even if the there are no misaligned Virtual Machines on a particular filer the speed doesn't improve nor does non Vmware connected servers. Nor does an aligned Virtual Machine run the tests any better then before we aligned it. But aligning is a good thing and as such heres some of the notes on the process.

First we need the MBRalign tools. You can download them from your vCenter client If you installed  IBM N series VSC on your vCenter. If you didn't start installing. This will add a plugin to your VCenter Client. Once thats installed, good luck, select a ESX host and there should be a "IBM N Series" Tab. From there select tools and download.

VCenter IBM N Series Tab

That download should be a "mbrtools.tar.gz" file that we need to copy to the ESXthat will be running the alignment and has access to the VM datastores. I use WinSCP to copy the file to the ESX host. You should also open the "mbrtools.tar.gz" file on your work station to view the readme and pdf how-to stored in it.

Note: Its normally necessary to SSH into a ESX server so I always create a local account to login remotely with and then su up to root. If you haven't done this it is really worth your time to do so. That same non root account is also useful to login with WinSCP to move files on and off the host.

Once the "mbrtools.tar.gz" file is on the ESX host SSH to that