Robocopy to the backup rescue

Robocopy to the backup rescue

So recently I had a client that had a SBS 2008 box that had a RAID issue. It had what known as a Punctured RAID , I will call it PR in this post. You can more on that here: http://www.dell.com/support/Article/us/en/04/438291/EN. The wonderful thing about a PR is they rear their ugly head till its too late. Well this client was too late.

The main reason I found out about this PR is that this clients Backup Exec kept failing. After fighting with the Backup Exec for over a week I finally found in the error logs something about this PR. This is what was making the Backup Exec fail. I could get into a lengthy discussion on this and at some point in time I might do that. 

Needless to  say because we couldn't use anything we threw at this server to back it up with out failing, and we tried a lot of options, I decided to use robocopy to try and keep at least a file level backup running for this server till we came up with a final solution for this issue. 

So this is the script I ended up making. I ran this as a nightly scheduled task with System user privileges. 

I know the script is kinda hacky and could be written better and more efficiently but it has a lot going on in it and I wanted to share. 

So basically it stops some services, robocopys files to an external drive then starts the services back up. 

With the mir option in the robocopy it made the copy very fast every night because it only grabbed what had been modified.

I used "net stop" and "net start" for some of the services.

I also used Powershell command Stop-Service  and Start-Services to start/start other services.

I broke out the main directories in the c: drive so that i could log what was happening in each directory when the robocopy ran.

In the robocopy sections I used the options:

/MIR :: MIRror a directory tree (equivalent to /E plus /PURGE).

/XJD :: eXclude Junction points for Directories.

/R:n :: number of Retries on failed copies: default 1 million.

/W:n :: Wait time between retries: default is 30 seconds.

/TEE :: output to console window, as well as the log file

/LOG:file :: output status to LOG file (overwrite existing log).

net stop msexchangeadtopology /y

net stop msftesql-exchange /y

net stop msexchangeis /y

net stop msexchangesa /y

net stop iisadmin /y

PowerShell.exe -Command "Stop-Service *sql* -Force"

robocopy "c:\Boot"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Boot" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyBoot.log"

robocopy "c:\dell"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\dell" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopydell.log"

robocopy "c:\drivers"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\drivers" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopydrivers.log"

robocopy "c:\ExchangeSetupLogs"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\ExchangeSetupLogs" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyExchangeSetupLogs.log"

robocopy "c:\inetpub"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\inetpub" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyinetpub.log"

robocopy "c:\OpenManage"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\OpenManage" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyOpenManage.log"

robocopy "c:\PerfLogs"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\PerfLogs" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyPerfLogs.log"

robocopy "c:\Program Files"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Program Files" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyProgram Files.log"

robocopy "c:\Program Files (x86)"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Program Files (x86)" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyProgram Files (x86).log"

robocopy "c:\ProgramData"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\ProgramData" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyProgramData.log"

robocopy "c:\Scripts"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Scripts" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyScripts.log"

robocopy "c:\Shared Data"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Shared Data" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyShared Data.log"

robocopy "c:\Users"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Users" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyUsers.log"

robocopy "c:\Windows"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\Windows" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyWindows.log"

rem robocopy "c:\WSUS"  "F:\Backuprobocopy\WSUS" /MIR /XJD    /w:1 /r:1 /V /tee /log:"f:\backuprobocopyWSUS.log"

net start msexchangeadtopology /y

net start msftesql-exchange /y

net start msexchangeis /y

net start msexchangesa /y

net start iisadmin /y

PowerShell.exe -Command "Start-Service -name """MSsql*""" " 

PowerShell.exe -Command "Start-Service -name """MSExchange*""" "

PowerShell.exe -Command "Start-Service -name """BackupExec*""" "

Turn off those Firewalls–Remotely–With PowerShell

Yet again I was given a task at work. This task was to turn off the Firewalls on hundreds of servers. So instead of logging into each one manually and changing the profiles on all the Firewall Profiles; Domain, Private and Public. I decided let us let PowerShell shine again.Now, they didn’t want the Firewall Services stopped, just the Profile states to be off. So after a little research and some help from some co-workers I put this script together.

Let’s talk about something thing through before I go into the script. The easiest way to turn off these Profile states is to run.

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off

This of course needs to be run locally on the machine. So I figured why not just use psexec to run the script. So I made a loop for the servers, looped it on the psexec and away it ran.. It ran VERY slowly. I had hundreds of these to run through. This would not work. So I decided to try and use PowerShell Invoke-Command. This required to have a session started using Enter-PSSession. Which of course gave this error.

 

Enter-PSSession : Connecting to remote server Server01 failed with the following error message : WinRM cannot process the request

 

Well that’s not going to work because I need to have the WinRM service installed. I don’t have the much time to get approvals to install the WinRM service on all these machines. So I remembered one of my coworkers had run scripts against a remote machine the other week using PowerShell. So I asked for his secret. The secret was  Invoke-WmiMethod. Here is the code simply put.

 

Invoke-WmiMethod -class Win32_process -name Create -ArgumentList (“CMD.EXE /C netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off”) –ComputerName Server01  

 

This actually runs the script against the server with no Invoke-Command or other service to be installed. So I set off to write the full script and it is FAST. Sooo much faster than I was hoping for.

 

$command = "netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off"

 

$cmd = "CMD.EXE /C " +$command

 

ForEach ($server in Get-Content "c:\scripts\computers.txt")

{

 

$theProc = Invoke-WmiMethod -class Win32_process -name Create -ArgumentList ($cmd) -ComputerName $server

If($theProc.ReturnValue -eq "0"){write-host  "$server - Completed successfully"}else{write-host  "$server - Completed UNsuccessfully"}

}

 

Now one of the downfalls of this is, you don’t know if the script worked. Of course you can go see on the server if the script did what it was supposed to do, but that is not what I am talking about. Basically you don’t get the output of the cmd. All you get is ReturnValue of 0 if the command went through correctly. Not that your script ran successfully. Just that your little cmd soldier has been sent into the field with the operations it was told to do successfully.

Windows Command-Line Reference A-Z List (not 2012)

INFO:

Here is nice little list of commands that can be run on windows from the command line. This applies to: Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Vista.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772390(v=ws.10).aspx

NOTES: 

Some of the commands only work for specific OS's. Example "Freedisk" is a Vista and Windows server 2008 command. So check before you try and use.