The Surly Admin

PowerShell Hero

An unexpected honor came across my Twitter feed today!

Tough Week

I’m not going to lie, this has been a really tough week professionally.  Not only am I wrapping up my time at SeraCare Life Sciences, Inc but I just implemented a new firewall in our HQ.  This firewall requires a site-to-site VPN to our co-hosting location and must support 3 subnet’s: server, workstation and VPN client and it’s been a nightmare.  We get the VPN’s up and working and then a few hours later they come crashing down.  Yesterday it devolved to the co-hosting site blaming my hardware while the hardware guy was blaming the co-hosting site!  To be fair, the Meraki guy was great and more than willing to dig into whatever needed to be done, but the co-hosting guy was so done and ready to go home–you could just hear it in his voice!

And we’re not done.  While it’s been up now for a while we had an outage today that only affected one subnet, and that lasted for about 2 hours.  Luckily almost no one accesses the co-host site from that subnet so we didn’t log any true downtime.  At the end I see all of the subnet’s disconnect for about 2-3 minutes and then everything came back up.  Obviously someone reset something!  Didn’t see anything in the Meraki logs so it must have been on the co-host side.  At this point I hope the co-host site has opened a ticket with Cisco TAC and we can dive deeper into this and get it resolved once and for all!

Ping Monitor, Multiple Hosts and Sources

On the plus side, I needed something that could test the site-to-site VPN from multiple subnet’s (I haven’t mentioned that I also have 2 remote sites that also have connections to the co-host site and those have gone up and down at various points during all this too) and multiple sources.  PowerShell to the rescue!  Turns out Test-Connection can do all of this relatively easily–I say relatively because nothing is ever as easy as it ought to be!  But the script is running now and has been incredibly useful!  I’ll make another post about it soon.

The Good News

So what did I see?  Turns out I was nominated for the 2014 PowerShell Hero‘s award over at PowerShell.org!  Not only that, I was chosen to be one of this years winners, along with some other very deserving people!  Teresa Wilson, who is more than just the wife of the Hey! Scripting Guy Ed Wilson, Dave Wyatt, a moderator on the forum’s at PowerShell.org, Mark E. Schill who runs his own blog here and last Francois-Xavier Cat who I’ve read over at LazyWinAdmin.  Oh yeah, and me!

It’s really an honor to be among these people and I can’t feel more than a little humbled!

Congratulations to everyone who got this recognition this year and let’s hope for a bigger and brighter 2014!

January 8, 2014 - Posted by Martin9700 | General | PowerShell Hero