Windows command line string search

If you find yourself using the Windows command line and are overwhelmed by the number or rows a command returns, you can filter the output so it only returns rows that match your criteria.  To do this you use the findstr command:  (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/findstr)

To match on a simple string you use the /C switch and pass the string

example:  netstat -oan | findstr /C:"abcd"

this will return all rows with "abcd" in it

If you want to be more fancy you can use the switch /R and it will evaluate the string you are searching for as a regular expression.

Powershell Scheduled Tasks

Here is a script to create a scheduled task via powershell and run as a specific user.  This can be useful when using a Core server that you can't create the scheduled task through the GUI, or if you want to add the scheduled task to source control.

<#example of how to do this with the schtasks command
schtasks /create /tn "TaskName" /tr "powershell.exe -file c:\scripts\script.ps1" /sc DAILY /st 22:00:00 /ru "System"
#>

$name = 'TaskName'
$runAt = '10:00 PM'
$exe = 'powershell.exe'
$params = '-file script.ps1'
$location = 'C:\scripts\'

<# if you want, you can delete an existing task.
Unregister-ScheduledTask -TaskName $name -TaskPath $taskPath -Confirm:$false -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue  
#>


$action = New-ScheduledTaskAction -Execute "$exe" -Argument "$params" -WorkingDirectory "C:\scripts"
$trigger = New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -Daily -At $runAt
Register-ScheduledTask -TaskName $name -TaskPath "\" -Action $action -Trigger $trigger -User 'System'  | Out-Null

This will create a task that runs the powershell script c:\scripts\script.ps1 every day at 10 PM and it will run as the System user.

Windows Update commands

If you want to tell Windows Update to kick off a scan for new updates from the command prompt there is a command you can use.  For systems prior to 2016 you can use:

wuauclt /detectnow

For systems after 2016 you will need to use:

usoclient startscan

Installing RSAT on 1809

Starting with Windows Server 1809 RSAT is no longer a downloadable option.  We see this on the Microsoft download page here.

So how do we install the tools? The easiest way I found to do this was to click on the start menu and search for "Apps & features".  On this screen click on Manage optional features.  This screen will list all the items that are already installed.  To add a new feature simply click on "Add a feature.  I installed the following two:

Once the feature has finished installing you can find the tools on the start menu, under Windows Administrative Tools.

SQL Server install troubleshooting

A while back I spun up a VM with Fedora installed so I could install the SQL Server 2017 Preview for Linux.  I found it really easy to setup and get going.  I was amazingly simple.  I don't recall the exact order of events but I believe I did an update to the OS and it broke SQL Server.  I attempted to remove SQL Server and install the RTM version.  But I never had much luck. 

Out of frustration I spun up a new VM and installed the RTM version to play around with.  Now that it is a year later I thought I would check out that old VM and see if I can get it working.  I figure it would be a good learning opportunity to learn a few things about Linux and to get familiar with the OS.  Here are my pertinant notes from this endeavor.

To start out I checked the status of the current install. 

systemctl status mssql-server

The result was that the service wasn't running.  So trying to restart the service like so also failed:

systemctl start mssql-server

The status was 127 which indicates that the command wasn't found.  I checked the path for Sql Server and it was present.  I had a hunch that a dependency was missing.  So I tried to do verbose logging for systemd, but don't think I was successful.

systemd-analyze set-log-level notice

I did check the logs with the following command.  Note the parameter "--since 20:00" means only entries since 8:00 PM.  My last attempt to start the service was at approximately 8:10 PM.

journalctl --since 20:00

I noticed a line that said a no such file or directory, however it was wasn't for sqlservr.  Instead it was for libc++.so.1

I wasn't sure why this was missing, so I ran.  So after doing some digging I realized there was a package that was named similar. So I gave installing it a try.

yum install libcxx

After installing this package SQL Server was able to successfully run.

However I was still not able to connect.  I checked the firewall:

firewall-cmd --list-ports

Port 1433/tcp was listed so it wasn't the host firewall.  I still couldn't connect so I checked the journal and found the following

So the system thought the process was running but it wasn't, it failed.  Doing a quick reinstall fixed it.

sudo yum remove mssql-server
sudo yum install mssql-server
sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup

After that I was able to connect.  Yay!