Monday, May 31, 2010

Another Reason Why PowerShell Matters

I’ve just been reading an interesting blog article in Peeters Online about fixing a DCOM issue that affects some machines. The issue results in Error Log entries with DCOM Event 10005 – Service can not be started. At least one common cause of this is disabling the Remote Storage Manager. The solution involved some manual registry editing and that is something I really do NOT like doing on production servers. 

In PeetersOnline, the author presents a nice PowerShell script to fix the issue. The script opens the remote registry, and does the necessary fixes. The script is parameterised therefore suited to larger organisations but more importantly, seems to handle the key error situations (keys not being found, not able to connect to the remote registry). You could go further, and create a trouble-shooter using the Windows SDK to enable remote admins to do the job even more simply (and perhaps both avoiding doing it where not needed and ensuring it’s done properly where it is).

This script shows how PowerShell can be used both to automate a solution and at the same time ensuring good documentation on what the fix is. The script , but also provides a measure of security from the admin that can’t type well! The reliable repetition of accurate instructions is a key to improving availability. It is things like this that make PowerShell so important.

Technorati Tags:

No comments: