Has anyone tried Powershell?

[speedbird]

I'm running spine and custom WMI VB scripts for a few polls (on a Windows server box, with IIS). Out of curiosity, has anyone tried using Powershell for custom scripts? If so, how'd it work, or did it?

My hunch is the main time waster would be waiting for PS to actually invoke - i've heard it said that any shell that takes more than 5 seconds to load isn't really a shell... i may have to agree.

Cheers.

[BSOD2600]

Funny you should bring this up...I was just reading an article about the improvements to powershell 2.0 and was thinking it would make a good replacement for WMI scripts (and lots of other things!). I haven't given it a try yet though, nor do recall anyone publishing powershell scripts. In theory, it really shouldn't be any different from other scripts to get working with Cacti.

[speedbird]

I've been doing a fair amount of work outside of Cacti w/ powershell. The biggest hassle I see is figuring out how to a) call powershell from within cacti, since PS is designed to not allow code to run without command line execution - i.e., you can't go start->run->mypowershellscript.ps1 . You have to be w/in the powershell cli, then run the script. and b) how to stop it from taking 5 to 10 seconds to load.

But the thought is intriguing, especially since it would allow much better interaction with WMI.

[BSOD2600]

a) call powershell from within cacti, since PS is designed to not allow code to run without command line execution - i.e., you can't go start->run->mypowershellscript.ps1 .

You apparently can though by changing some settings. More details: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 76949.aspx

b) how to stop it from taking 5 to 10 seconds to load.

Read through Speeding Up PowerShell Startup and the other linked posts with the ngen scripts?

Otherwise, an ideal dream is that Cacti will one day support script servers for customizable languages i.e. perl script server, powershell script server, etc. That way the main executable stays open during the polling cycle and gets fed scripts instead of a new instance launched for every script.

[weirk]

The real problem is being able to use it from a linux box. LOL.
Well at least for me it is, I have a lot of devices and windows boxes just can't handle it, I've been able to get the wmi queries to work from linux, barely.
I am a big powershell user, between vmware, sql, exchange, desktop management. It's great, and you can use the powershell get-wmi to gather wmi objects as well as dig through them, and get values. You can also have it do things multithreaded, etc... But getting those results back to a linux box might be a pain (not impossible) Powershell is heavily into the .NET, so I have a hard time seeing there being a port to linux.
But for the windows cacti machines, it could be handy.

[mrossFTEK]

reviving an old topic, but you can do powershell on linux
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power ... rshell-7.3

[Osiris]

Well, that's cute. MS made PowerShell OSS. So, this makes sense.

[TheWitness]

A script server for powershell might be interesting. I'm not sure how it would work or course.

[netniV]

PowerShell can be run directly and passed a script plus parameters to run. There may be startup issues if many modules are set to auto-load when PowerShell starts, but a bare PowerShell should not take long at all.

[TheWitness]

I read that as Script Server for Powershell may not be required.