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August 28, 2007

Geta Bako (Japanese shoe box), Part 1

geta-bako5.jpgMy wife requested a small geta-bako (shoe storage cabinet) in the front entry way to hold the shoes. Since we live in a tiny California ranch style house, we needed a matching (tiny) shoe box. After careful measurement I decided it could stick out 9 inches from the wall, unfortunately my shoe size is 10 & 1/2, so my shoes will have to go in sideways... :-)

I purchased a Kreg pocket hole jig last year, so the theme for this project was pocket holes. It's actually almost finished, I haven't quite decided what kind of doors to put on it yet, so it's in use without them for now. Here's the first half of the pictures I took while building it. This picture is without the final face frame (or finish), but will give you an idea what it looks like now.

(More pictures below...)



geta-bako.jpg



Here is one of the side panels. The material is solid American maple and birch veneer 1/4" ply. Next time I'll make the side panels out of solid maple, but like everything else I had leftover material and not enough time for another trip to Southern Lumber...

geta-bako2.jpg



A view of the side panel being dropped in. The center groove was cut on the table saw, the very top and bottom of the groove are filled in and not visible.

geta-bako4.jpg


A detail view of the pocket holes before the plugs are put in. The plugs are solid maple, and after sanding and planing are almost invisible.

geta-bako3.jpg


This is the back and two sides held together with the clamp. The two sides were attached with biscuits and glue, then for a little extra strength I inset three screws per side and plugged the holes with cherry plugs.


More pictures to come...














August 12, 2007

Exchange 2003 monitoring with PowerShell (WMI)

First up, simplify your powershell development by getting the PowerShell WMI Explorer. (Think Scriptomatic for PowerShell). Get it here.

I want to modernize some of my monitoring scripts for Exchange 2003 and use PowerShell (of course). Since Exchange 2007 will be the first version with native PowerShell support, we'll have to do our queries through WMI.

Here's a couple of simple ones....

Note: Change ExchangeServer to the hostname for your environment.


Query Status of all SMTP connectors
Query the status of all SMTP connectors and show the names and Up status (true=up, false=down)

get-wmiobject -class "ExchangeConnectorState" -namespace "root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange" -computername ExchangeServer | select Name,IsUp | Sort-Object -property Name

Query all SMTP Q's and show those with 10 or more queued messages
Dump a list of all SMTP queues with 10 or more queued messages, sorted by number.

get-wmiobject -class "ExchangeLink" -namespace "root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange" -computername ExchangeServer | select LinkName,NumberOfMessages | where {$_.NumberOfMessages -gt 10} | sort -property NumberOfMessages -desc

Get Exchange Server status (by Admin Group)
Get a list of all Exchange servers and their status. This query is by Admin Group GUID which will allow you to filter out the home office servers that are always down...

get-wmiobject -class "ExchangeServerState" -namespace "root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange" -computername ExchangeServer | where {$_.GroupGUID -eq "{insert_your_GUID_here}"} | select name,ServerState,Unreachable

This would query for all Exchange servers, regardless of admin group.

get-wmiobject -class "ExchangeServerState" -namespace "root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange" -computername ExchangeServer | select name,ServerState,Unreachable

Here let's just get the ones that are unreachable

get-wmiobject -class "ExchangeServerState" -namespace "root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange" -computername ExchangeServer | where {$_.Unreachable -match "False"} | select Name,Unreachable



Send a SMTP report (Simple)

$smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient("localhost")
$smtp.Send("from@yourdomain.com", "recipient@theirdomain.com", "insert subject here", "insert body here")

Send a SMTP report (including a log file)

$filename = "logfile.txt"
$smtpServer = "localhost"

$msg = new-object Net.Mail.MailMessage
$att = new-object Net.Mail.Attachment($filename)
$smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)

$msg.From = from@mydomain.com
$msg.To.Add("too@anotherdomain.com")
$msg.Subject = "Nightly Log File"
$msg.Body = "The nightly log file is attached below"
$msg.Attachments.Add($att)

$smtp.Send($msg)