Haiku #179
Why do you want to
Run computer cmdlets?
Just because they're there.
For those of you who've been sitting up all night waiting for the final outcome, you can finally rest assured: Sunset Peak has been conquered!
Yes, it's true: yesterday afternoon the author of today's haiku (and his wife/Sherpa porter) reached the summit of Sunset Peak, all 10,648 feet of it. As far as they know, they are the first people to ever reach the summit of Sunset Peak!
Well, except for the two guys who were hiking ahead of them. And the family of four – Dad, Mom, two girls – who were already walking around the summit when they got there. And the couple that, having conquered Sunset Peak, moved on to climb another nearby mountain before starting on their way down. But other than that, they are – possibly – the first people to ever reach the summit of Sunset Peak!
At any rate, if you ever happen to find yourself at the Brighton Ski Resort in the middle of summer, and have a few hours to kill, the author of today's haiku recommends hiking up to Sunset Peak. It's a bit of a challenge: 2000 feet of elevation gain in just 2.5 miles. But it's a pretty cool little hike: fields of wildflowers, scrambles up granite boulders, cool little lakes, and rushing streams. The author and his wife even had the chance to climb up a waterfall!
Well, OK, it was really more of a stream trickling downhill than, say, Niagara Falls. But hey, a waterfall's a waterfall, right?
Right.
At any rate, a good hike, and one of the crowning achievements in the life of the author of today's haiku.
Note. Completing a hike that tens of thousands of people before him have already completed is one of his crowning achievements? Sadly, yes.
Nevertheless, summiting Sunset Peak pales a bit before his greatest achievement ever: successfully running the CsComputer cmdlets (Disable-CsComputer, Enable-CsComputer, and Test-CsComputer).
Now, admittedly, that's not really much of an achievement, either: the CsComputer cmdlets aren't particularly difficult to run. It's just that, with the possible exception of Test-CsComputer, these are also cmdlets you won't find yourself running very often, either. So, the fact that hardly anyone ever runs these cmdlets, and the author of today's haiku has run these cmdlets, well, that counts as an achievement.
For him anyway.
Note. Did we mention that the author was one of the first million people ever to summit Sunset Peak?
Let's take on Disable-CsComputer, for starters. By default, Disable-CsComputer disables all the Lync Server services/server roles on a computer. Suppose you want to take a Lync Server machine out of commission, but for some reason the Setup Wizard won't let you do this. That's fine; just run this command instead:
Disable-CsComputer
Note. Good point: we didn't specify the computer we wanted to disable, did we? And there's a good reason for that: Disable-CsComputer has to be run on the computer about to be decommissioned; you can't run the cmdlet remotely. Because of that, there's no need to specify the computer name: Disable-CsComputer is going to disable whatever computer it happens to be running on.
Which, among other things, means you shouldn't "practice" running this cmdlet on computers where the Lync Server services/server roles should not be disabled.
The preceding command disables all the services/server roles on a computer, but does not uninstall Lync Server from that computer. (In theory, that means you can resume all the Lync Server services simply by running Enable-CsComputer. For better or worse, however, things don't always go quite that smoothly.) If you do want to uninstall all the Lync Server components, then simply include the Scorch parameter, like so:
Disable-CsComputer -Scorch
And yes, "Scorch" is a really cool parameter name, isn't it?
Enable-CsComputer, as you might expect, is used to enable Lync Server services and server roles on the local computer. (Sorry, but you can't run this cmdlet remotely, either.) Enable-CsComputer is actually a cmdlet you might find yourself running from time-to-time. For example, if you change your simple URLs you might need to run Enable-CsComputer to make sure that those changes take effect; likewise, users who upgrade from the evaluation version of Lync Server to the real, live version of Lync Server need to run the cmdlet at the end of the upgrade process. Oh: and Enable-CsComputer can also be used to repair share permissions on your Lync shares.
Anyway, the point is this: there might actually come a time when you need to run the Enable-CsComputer cmdlet. And what are you supposed to do when that time comes? This:
Enable-CsComputer
Yep, that's it. If you want to get fancy we suppose you could do this:
Enable-CsComputer -Report "C:\Logs\EnableComputer.html"
That command, with the Report parameter, lets you specify the file path for the report that Enable-CsComputer automatically creates each time it runs. But that's about as fancy as it gets, at least when dealing with Enable-CsComputer.
As for Test-CsComputer (which, again, can only be run locally), this command verifies the status of all the Lync Server services/server roles on the computer; checks to see if the appropriate firewall ports have been opened on the computer, and determines whether or not the Active Directory groups created when you installed Lync Server 2010 have been added to the corresponding local groups. (For example, Test-CsComputer verifies that the Active Directory group RTCUniversalUserAdmins has been added to the local Administrators group.) In other words, Test-CsComputer verifies that all the Lync Server components on a computer have been installed and configured correctly. And how do you actually run Test-CsComputer? You got it:
Test-CsComputer
Note. Yes, it does seem like we really aren't doing any work at all today, doesn't it? But then why should today be different from any other day?
And that brings today's haiku to a rousing conclusion. If you get bored sometime, and if you have a spare computer running Lync Server, you might mess around with the different CsComputer cmdlets and see happens. (We should note that you can run Enable-CsComputer and Test-CsComputer any time you want, and on any computer you want: they're essentially harmless.) Alternatively, you might write to the wife of the author of today's haiku, who recently tamed Sunset Peak, and encourage her to set her sights on Mt. Timpanagos, 11,749 feet. The author of today's haiku nagged her into hiking up Sunset Peak; so far, nagging about Mt. Timpanagos hasn't gone quite as well.
See you tomorrow.