Today’s 10 Commands: Command-Line Navigation

Introducing 2 new blog series: Today’s 10 & Fab 5

This is the first of many blog posts about commands, utilities and tips I’m either learning for the first time or re-familiarizing myself with. This series is called Today’s 10, 10 commands, tips, tricks, etc. I will have another series called Fab 5 for the quick hitters that I come across.

Command-Line navigation:

We all have done it, backspaced and back and forth, arrow up and down the command line. Trying to correct errors, change things after an erroneous tab completions and make changes to command after we’ve pulled them up in our history.

Here are 10 commands that will have you zipping around the shell prompt in no time.

Alt+b – will move your cursor back one word at a time to start of the word.
Alt+f – will move your cursor forward one word at a time to the end of the word.
Alt+d – will delete to the end of that misspelled word starting at the cursor.
Ctrl+e – move your cursor at the end of the line.
Ctrl+ a – move your cursor to the beginning of the line.
Ctrl+l – clear your screen (clear also will do the trick).
Ctrl +w – deletes from the cursor to the beginning of the word or path.
Ctrl+c – clears the entire line. (yes, THAT ctrl+c) and takes to to a blank command prompt.
Ctrl+f – move cursor forward one character at a time, like the right arrow key.
Ctrl+b – move cursor backward one character at a time, like the left arrow key.

Watch your command-line navigation improve as you use these keystrokes more and more. There are many, many more, but these are the 10 that I use the most.

What are some of your favorite command-line shortcuts?

04
Dec
2017

404 error when downloading .iso file on IIS

categories: IIS

I’m running IIS8 and I have a site where I can wget and download isos easily.

I got a 404 error when trying to download an iso:

You must add the correct MIME type for the file you’re trying to download.

From IIS Manager, go to Sites > YOUR_SITE> and in the features view, double-click MIME Types.

Under actions, click Add.

Enter the file extension iso and the MIME type application/octetstream

Click OK and retry your download.

16
Oct
2017

Veeam Backup & Replication stops when temp license expired

categories: Veeam

Environment:

Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) and Enterprise Manager(EM) Version	9.5.0.1038
Windows Version	2016
Veeam Agent for Windows(VAW)	2.0

After downloading and installing the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows on my workstation and adding the agent to VBR, I scheduled my job and let it run. However, I let the license expire before purchasing one.

Every backup in my vSphere environment stopped backing up on schedule. Manual jobs ran and completed, but nothing would run as scheduled. Here is the proper way of removing the expired license from VBR.

Launch the command prompt as Administratrator and cd to C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Enterprise Manager. Enter:

> Veeam.Backup.EnterpriseService.exe -removelicense vaw

You’ll be prompted to continue the license removal, press y.

Next, restart both VBR and EM and verify at all licenses have been removed. Test your jobs by rescheduling one for a few minutes out, once the job runs, the hosts that the VMs run on will begin to re-add themselves to Licensed Hosts.

12
Oct
2017

-ShowWindow in Powershell help

categories: powershell

The adage, you learn something new everyday is very true.

I’m reading a book called Learn Powershell in a Month of Lunches by Don Jones and Jeff Hicks and I just discovered a helpful nugget I didn’t know existed, -ShowWindow.

Example:
help Get-ADGroupMember -showwindow

The -ShowWindow parameter will give you a popup window with the help topic you’re researching. You can search words and phrases within the help topic. The found term is highlighted for easy reading and you can move between terms using the previous and next buttons. The window can be resized and you can increase or decrease the text with the slider at the bottom of the window. The description is a bit shorter for some cmdlets, but there are even some command examples displayed in the help window to get you going without coming out of your prompt.

The PowerShell help window — -ShowWindow

Gone are the days of opening a second Powershell window to reference the help while crafting command line syntax. -ShowWindow is a great too in the Powershell arsenal.

~Note~ This works differently in PS 4.0 and 5.0. and within different builds of Windows 10. 
Some contents are missing or out of order. It appears it is a known issue.
Your mileage may vary.

Don’t forget Help Cmdletname -online It launches help in the browser. Keeping you in your PS window without taking you away from your prompt.

18
Sep
2017

Check the hash on a file using PowerShell

categories: powershell

Checking the hash of a file you’ve downloaded from the internet is very good practice. It’s a way to ensure the file you’re downloading hasn’t been tampered with, according to the hash provided on the site you’re downloading from.

Since Powershell 4.0, Get-FileHash has been a way to check the hash signature of a file.

Get-FileHash -Path C:\Path\to\file\file.exe -Algorithm SHA256

Get-FileHash can check the following signatures:

SHA1
SHA256 (default value)
SHA384
SHA512
MACTripleDES
MD4
RIPEMD160

04
May
2017

Disks not visible to ESXi host

categories: vSphere

I have (4) new Dell PowerEdge R730xd Ready Nodes that I’m using for a new vSAN 6.6 cluster.

The systems are up to date on drivers and firmware. The controller is a PERC H730 mini, which is supported for pass-through. I installed the hypervisor on the SD card and checked to see if I could see the SSDs from vCenter. The drives weren’t visible.

I SSH’d in the host and ran:

~ esxcli storage nmp device list

It only returned the SD card.

To get your disks to show up in your host, you have to reset the controller. First, put the host into maintenance mode.

Log into the iDRAC. Overview > Storage>Controller > Troubleshooting tab.

Under the actions drop down, select Reset Configuration.

You’ll get a warning. Click OK to confirm.

Once the process is started, you can monitor the job queue’s progress.

When the reset is done, you set the disks to Non-Raid.

Under Storage > Physical disks> Setup Tab, you click on the down arrow under Action-Assign to all.

Select Convert to Non-Raid and click apply. You can monitor the progress in the job queue.

Once it has completed, take the host out of maintenance mode and check the storage devices.

You should now be able to see all of your disks that are now available to the host for vSAN

08
Apr
2017

Master Dead but PID File exists

categories: Linux

Users reported that mail stopped being sent from their server.

Tried to test email functionality from the command line.

# echo "Subject: Testing Sendmail from server.domain.com" | sendmail -v admin@domain.com
This is a test
BYE
[ctrl + D]

The message wasn’t sent. I tailed the maillog & checked the service status:

# tail -n 500 /var/log/maillog
# service sendmail status
master dead by pid file exists

I checked to see if any Sendmail processes were running and there were several.

 ps -ef | grep sendmail

Stopped the service, deleted the master.pid and the lock file and killed all the sendmail processes, then restarted the sendmail service

# service sendmail stop
# rm /var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid
# rm /var/lock/subsys/sendmail
# killall -9 sendmail
# service sendmail start
# service sendmail status

Tailed the logs, resent the email and it was delivered.

# watch tail -n 20 /var/log/maillog

29
Nov
2016

Edit files from Windows Command Line

categories: Windows

I was adding entries to my hosts file on Windows 10 and I got an Access is Denied message when I saved the file in Notepad. Here are 2 quick ways to edit system files.

1) Right+Click Command Prompt or Notepad and Run as Administrator (old faithful)
2) From the Command Line, as Administrator, start notepad.exe “hosts” (from the etc folder of course) or for more bang for your buck, open notepad++ with start notepad++.exe “hosts” if you have it installed.

12
Aug
2016

When you resize the wrong hard disk on a vm

categories: disk partitioning, vmware

I’m running WSUS on a 2012R2 server and the drive where the updates are tends to grow a lot. On this VM, I increased the provisioned size of the c:\ drive and not the drive where the updates reside. I didn’t notice I’d touched the wrong disk until I’d rescanned the disks on the VM and saw what I’d done.

As panic set in, I changed the provisioned size back to 60GB (I know, I know) and well, you know the rest. This article saved me today. I didn’t want to restore the VM unless I really had no choice, this did the trick.

Power off the VM and identify the host & datastore that the VM resided on, I enabled SSH and browsed to the VM location.

Cat out the descriptor file (vmname.vmdk) that outlines the data layout on the virtual disk. In the Extend Description section, you’ll see the extent(s) info. Next to RW (if it’s read/write) a number. That number represents the size of the vmdk in sectors, with the additional 200GB included.

To change the sector size to reflect the value I’m shrinking the drive back down to, 60GB, calculate it:

60GB = 60 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 / 512 = 125829120 sectors

Edit the descriptor file and change the sectors to the new number, save and exit.

Come out of the directory where the VM resides and VMotion it to another datastore. Review the settings of the vm and take note of the new and improved disk size.

Power on the VM and review the size in Disk Management.

Now, grow the right disk and try not to ever do that again.

19
May
2016

Error Applying Security- Access is Denied

categories: server administration, Windows 2008 R2

Windows server administration is not without those DOH! moments. How is it that I, the administrator cannot change the permissions on a folder?

Access Denied Message — I will not be denied

The easiest way to fix this is to take ownership of the folder using the TAKEOWN command. Takeown is a tool that will allow an administrator to recover access to a file or folder that was denied by reassigning ownership. Open the command prompt and run as administrator.

takeown /f F:\FolderName /r /d y

/f Specify the file name or directory

/r Recurse through all directories and sub directories

/d Prompt with an answer of Yes

Now you can change the permissions as needed.

Windows Security Prompt — That’s more like it