No Znx!

So I had a problem on Windows in that I have lots of directories that are named correctly but I wish the files under them to be uniformly named.

The solution was to use PowerShell, which is an extremely effective scripting tool for Windows, especially if you come from a UNIX shell background.

There is actually quite a lot of documentation available for it and rather than go into detail I will simply show you the script:

#
# RenameDirectoryFiles.ps1
#
 
param( [string[]]$paths )
Set-PSDebug -Strict
 
foreach ( $path in $paths ) {
    if ( !(Test-Path $path -PathType Container) ) {
        Write-Error "'$path' doesn't exist or isn't a directory"
        exit 1
    }
 
    $i = 0
    Get-ChildItem $path | sort FullName | foreach {
        $tmp = "{0:000}" -f $i
        $ext = $_.Extension
        $newname = "$path - $tmp$ext"
        Rename-Item $_.fullname $newname
        $newname
        $i = $i + 1
    }
}

So the usage is extremely simple:

RenameDirectoryFiles.ps1 'My Directory'

After which all the files under ‘My Directory’ will be renamed to ‘My Directory – 000.fileextension’.

I was recently pointed to the English and Polish pages for the MS Business Productivity. The most striking thing about the difference between the pages is that one depicts a white individual in place of a black individual. What could be the purpose of altering the image, surely it isn’t racism, after all the Chinese individual is still in place.

Strange what goes through the brain of MS Business Productivity.

Polish Alternative

English Alternative

I was recently asked if it was possible to monitor the Event Log for a single event and ensure that it was occurring regularly. It is rare that I handle Windows scripting and when I do I normally find myself cursing it, haha! In this case we want to ensure that a print server is constantly printing through the day, we expect that at least 1 print job will occur every 15 minutes, if not then we’d like a warning. Obviously this check should only run during work hours.

So the first step is relatively simple, access the Event Log and look for a single event by its event code.

set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\root\cimv2")
set colEvents = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
   ("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'System' and EventCode = 10")

What we did here was grab all the events with event code of 10 (a print job!). So if we count the number of events within a range then we will have basically completed a huge part of the work.

So next step is to make an interval that will be 15 minutes back from whatever time is current.

set dtmStartDate = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemDateTime")
dtmStartDate.SetVarDate DateAdd("n",-15,Now()),True

And applying that into our statement:

set colEvents = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
   ("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'System' and EventCode = 10" _
   & " and TimeWritten >= '" & dtmStartDate & "'")

This means that we are now collecting the events that only occurred within the last fifteen minutes. So what next, well we need to have a statement to pass to BigBrother to indicate success or failure. Fortunately enough I have another script which monitors the cluster (thanks to the awesome DeadCat repository) and it has some code to help place the file that BigBrother collects.

const HKLM = &H80000002
strBBExtPathNew = "SOFTWARE\Quest Software\BigBrother\bbnt\ExternalPath"
strBBExtPathOld = "SOFTWARE\BigBrother\bbnt\ExternalPath"
set oReg = GetObject("winmgmts:\root\default:StdRegProv")
 
oReg.GetStringValue HKLM,strBBExtPathNew,,strExtPath
if isNull(strExtPath) then
  oReg.GetStringValue HKLM,strBBExtPathOld,,strExtPath
end if
if isNull(strExtPath) then
  WScript.Quit
end if

Read more…

A mate of mine was reading this and made some great comments about it! First up there is a Bash version of expect (THANK GOD!). Secondly fetchmail maybe a better solution to grabbing the mail to see if it was received, another good comment! Unfortunately for me I was working on a system with the tools that were available to me, that means no fetchmail and no empty installed.

Interestingly it didn’t initially work 100% of the time, after a little bit of testing it looked like Microsoft were temporarily throwing away some of the test e-mails. Interesting as it must mean that they look for repetitious e-mails in a bid to fight SPAM. We of course simply contacted MS and got it sorted and now the e-mails come in every hour.

What this does show us though, is that under UNIX/Linux there is a lot of different solutions that can be made, but sometimes you have to work with the tools that are there.

At my work we have two domains and recently one of those domains was blacklisted, thanks to some phishing e-mails hitting their marks. So I was tasked today to setup an automated e-mail send and check. To ensure that we can send between our domains.

First up I checked to see that I was able to get a POP3 connection to the other domain, as it is hosted by Microsoft for us. Whilst I was able to connect via POP3 I was unable to login. A quick check revealed that only POP3S was being accepted. This meant that I was going to need to utilize the simple s_client tool available with OpenSSL.

So to testing:

$ openssl s_client -connect SERVER:995
.... blah blah ....
+OK The POP3 Service is ready.
USER test.user@example.com
^C
$

Hrmm, what’s going on here, the server isn’t responding to my USER. A quick brain check and I spotted my issue, line endings!

$ openssl s_client -connect SERVER:995 -crlf
.... blah blah ....
+OK The POP3 Service is ready.
USER test.user@example.com
+OK
PASS mypassword
+OK User successfully logged in.
STAT
+OK 49 2758446
QUIT
DONE

That’s more like it. Now I know that I can connect, logged and run arbitrary commands. It may be perfectly OK to manually check like this but that isn’t the reason we started this, we want an automated solution.

The most obvious solution here is expect, ugh TCL! With the above information it is easy to write a simple expect script:

#!/usr/bin/env expect
spawn openssl s_client -connect SERVER:995 -crlf
expect "+OK The POP3 service is ready."
send "USER test.user@example.com\r"
expect "+OK"
send "PASS mypassword\r"
expect "+OK User successfully logged on."
send "QUIT\r"
expect "DONE"
expect eof

Simple enough, send a command and expect a response. Obviously it helps if you understand the protocol that you are dealing with. Running that script happily logs in and then quits. Sweet, we are halfway there already!

So to recap, I plan on sending an e-mail from the first domain to my test account on the second domain and then check that the e-mail actually arrived. Thus proving that the e-mail was getting through without issue. So when I do this I will wish to get the newest e-mail in my INBOX, which may not the be the first. So the script needs some modifying.

#!/usr/bin/env expect
spawn openssl s_client -connect SERVER:995 -crlf
expect "+OK The POP3 service is ready."
send "USER test.user@example.com\r"
expect "+OK"
send "PASS mypassword\r"
expect "+OK User successfully logged on."
send "STAT\r"
expect -re "OK (.*) .*" {
  set number $expect_out(1,string)
}
send "TOP $number 1\r"
expect "\."
expect "+OK"
send "QUIT\r"
expect "DONE"
expect eof

Now expect will grab the number of e-mails in the INBOX and request the headers of the newest one. So the final step is integrating this with a simple check. Lets just use a shell script to check with:

#!/bin/sh
TS=`date +%s`
echo "Subject: TESTING $TS
 
Hi,
 
This is a test please do not delete me!
 
Thanks" | mail test.user@example.com
sleep 60
expect collect.exp | grep $TS && \
 echo "Success The E-Mail Arrived!" ||\
 echo "Failure The E-Mail Was Not Found!"

That works, a test and we have a success! We find the TS in the subject line of the e-mail. There is a minor problem here, what happens if I e-mail the test and in-between I receive some other e-mails, hrmm! OK so why don’t we dump the headers of the first few e-mails, we certainly don’t expect a rush of e-mails on a test account within a minute. Let’s change the expect script just a bit more:

#!/usr/bin/env expect
 
spawn openssl s_client -connect SERVER:995 -crlf
expect "+OK The POP3 service is ready."
send "USER test.user@example.com\r"
expect "+OK"
send "PASS mypassword\r"
expect "+OK User successfully logged on."
send "STAT\r"
expect -re "OK (.*) .*" {
  set number $expect_out(1,string)
}
send "TOP $number 1\r"
expect "\."
expect "+OK"
set number [expr $number-1]
send "TOP $number 1\r"
expect "\."
expect "+OK"
set number [expr $number-1]
send "TOP $number 1\r"
expect "\."
expect "+OK"
send "QUIT\r"
expect "DONE"
expect eof

Placing the shell script into a crontab and we are done. Yet another example of how simple scripting can achieve anything.