Replace netsh with Windows PowerShell – Basic network cmdlets

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Some days ago I made a blog post about how you can replace diskpart.exe with the new cmdlets in Windows PowerShell v3. Now my next goal was to replace netsh with PowerShell.

Microsoft offers a lot of new cmdlets for networking tasks lets see what we have here. We got a lot of new PowerShell modules which are related to networking.

Now the two modules which sound really interesting are

NetAdapter
NetTCPIP

lets check which cmdlets are included

Get-Command -Module NetAdapter

 Get-Command -Module NetTCPIP

Now lets start with NetAdpater.

List all Network Adapters

 Get-NetAdapter

Just list Wireless Network Adapters

 Get-NetAdapter -Name *Wireless*

Get more information VLAN ID, Speed, Connection status

 Get-NetAdapter | ft Name, Status, Linkspeed, VlanID

Get driver information

 Get-NetAdapter | ft Name, DriverName, DriverVersion, DriverInformation, DriverFileName

Get adapter hardware information. This can be really usefull when you need to know the PCI slot of the NIC.

 Get-NetAdapterHardwareInfo

Disable and Enable a Network Adapter

 Disable-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless Network Connection"
Enable-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless Network Connection"

Rename a Network Adapter

 Rename-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless Network Connection" -NewName "Wireless"

Now with the NetTCPIP PowerShell module we can work with IP settings

Get IP and DNS address information

 Get-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" | Get-NetIPAddress

Get IP address only

 (Get-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" | Get-NetIPAddress).IPv4Address

Get DNS Server Address information

 Get-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" | Get-DnsClientServerAddress

Set IP Address

 New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -IPv4Address 10.0.1.95 -PrefixLength "24" -DefaultGateway 10.0.1.1

or if you want to change a existing IP Address

 Set-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -IPv4Address 192.168.12.25 -PrefixLength "24"

Remove IP Address

 Get-NetAdapter -Name "Wireless" | Remove-NetIPAddress

Set DNS Server

 Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -ServerAddresses "10.10.20.1","10.10.20.2"

Set interface to DHCP

 Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias "Wireless" -Dhcp Enabled

Now with this basic knowledge we can replace some of the basic netsh commands and ipconfig

netsh

ipconfig
netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" newname="Management"
netsh interface ipv4 set address "Management" static 192.168.10.101 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1

Windows PowerShell

Get-NetAdapter
Rename-NetAdapter -Name "Local Area Connection" -NewName "Management"
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "Management" -IPv4Address 192.168.10.101 -PrefixLength "24" -DefaultGateway 192.168.10.1

Replace Diskpart with Windows PowerShell – Basic Storage cmdlets

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 8

Last week I made a blog post about how you can create a USB drive for Windows To Go. In my post I used diskpart.exe to format the USB drive. Now we don’t live in the stone age anymore, so I did the same with the new version of Windows PowerShell coming in Windows 8 and Windows Server 8.

Now here some basic cmdlets to do some simple storage operations, like clean a disk, create a partition and so on.

Lets start simple

List all disks

Get-Disk

Now get all partitions

Get-Partition

Now get all partitions of disk 0

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 0

Clear a Disk

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData

Create a new partition

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize

Format this volume

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1 | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS

Create new partition and format it with the label “USB”:

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

Change driveletter

Set-Partition -DriveLetter E -NewDriveLetter T

Set a partition active

Set-Partition -DriveLetter T -IsActive $ture

Remove a partition

Remove-Partition -DriveLetter T

Bring a disk online

 Set-Disk 1 -isOffline $false

Remove Readonly flag

 Set-Disk 1 -isReadOnly $false

Initialize Disk with GPT

 Initialize-Disk 1 -PartitionStyle GPT

This is some basic knowledge about the storage module in PowerShell v3. Lets see how we can change the commands from using diskpart to Windows PowerShell.

Diskpart.exe

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign letter=e

PowerShell:

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -IsActive -DriveLetter E | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Cannot acces NetApp CIFS share

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

If you try to connect to a NetApp CIFS share via Windows 8 beta you may cannot access the share because of the following error:

SMB connections fail with error “Invalid Signature”

Cause:

This behavior may be due to the “Secure Negotiate” feature added to SMB 2.24 for the Windows “8″ beta release, which relies on the correct signing of error responses by all SMB 2 servers (including those supporting only protocol versions 2.0 and 2.1). Some third-party file servers do not respond with a signed error response causing the connection to fail.

Microsoft has two workrounds for this problem:

Enable signing on the third-party file server.
Disable “Secure Negotiate” on the client.

You can disable “Secure Negotiate” with the following PowerShell command:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters" RequireSecureNegotiate -Value 0 -Force

Checkout the Microsoft KB2686098

Update

Only some minutes after I released this blog post I got an anwser from Glenn Sizemore (NetApp) how you can enable SMB 2 signing on the NetApp.

ONTAP CLI:

options cifs.smb2.signing.required on

PowerShell:

ipmo DataONTAP
Connect-NaController controller
Set-NaOption cifs.smb2.signing.required off

Thanks for that.

Windows Server 8: Enable CSV Cache

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 8

In Windows Server 8 beta, Microsoft released a lot of new features for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). One of them is CSV Cache. CSV Cache gives you the possibility to allocate system memory (RAM) of the cluster nodes as cache. This can improve the performance of read requests in workloads like Hyper-V.

Now to enable the CSV Cache on a cluster you have to do this with Windows PowerShell.

First open the PowerShell prompt
Set the size of the CSV Cache. The default it 512MB. With this command you will reserve the Memory on all Cluster nodes for caching.
```
(Get-Cluster). SharedVolumeBlockCacheSizeInMB = 512
```

Now you have to enable the Cache on on the Cluster Shared Volumes you want to use.

Get-ClusterSharedVolume “Cluster Disk 1” | Set-ClusterParameter  CsvEnableBlockCache 1

If you want to know more about CSV Cache, you can read this blog post from Elden Christensen on the Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing Team Blog.

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

If you have a Samsung Series 7 Slate PC which normally comes with Windows 7 but you want to try out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it, Samsung offers now drivers and a firmware upgrade for your Slate.

You can get it here: http://www.samsung.com/global/windowspreview/

Windows 8: How to create a Windows To Go USB drive

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft released a new feature called “Windows To Go” with Windows 8. With this feature it is possible to boot your Windows 8 from a USB drive on any PC. In this post I show you how you can do this.

Requirements

UBS drive with 16GB free Space
A PC running Windows 8
The Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO

Step-by-Step

First let me show you my setup to begin with.

I have my System Drive (C:), the USB drive I want to use (E:) and the Windows 8 ISO mounted (F:)

Run diskpart
With “list disk” you can list all your disk
Now select your usb drive (select disk 1) and clean it. After that you can create a new partition and format that and close diskpart.
```
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign letter=e
exit
```
Now in my case the ISO is mounted as drive F:. Now with dism I can apply the Windows Image to my USB drive (E:)
```
dism /apply-image /imagefile=f:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /applydir:e:\
```
Now you have to make this drive bootable
```
bcdboot e:\windows /s e: /f ALL
```
now you are done. You can now boot your USB drive. The first boot will take some time to setup.

If you want to know more about Windows To Go I recommend you the Microsoft session from the BUILD conference.