http://www.gradwell.com/support/kb/article.php?id=159

I wrote a powershell script to test the system and it worked well, but I didn’t really have a practical use for dialing from the command line.  Yesterday I was by chance reading about Extending the Internet Explorer Context Menu.

I decided to put together a quick bit of code that would allow me to initiate calls directly from Internet Explorer to my Gradwell extension, and it works really well!  I ditched the original Powershell version in favour of javascript because it made the solution much neater.

To make this work for you need to setup an authentication token for your extension on the Gradwell VoIP control panel first. Make a note of your extention and authentication token.

Download this HTML File (right click - Save Target as) and store it locally somewhere on your machine.  Open the file for editing and modify with your own extension number and authentication token:

Now we just need to create the internet explorer context menu, create the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\&Gradwell Call]
@=REG_SZ:”C:\some\path\to\View\DialGradwell.htm”
Contexts=REG_DWORD:10

You will need to change “c:\some\path\to” to the actual folder where you saved “DialGradwell.htm”.

Open Internet Explorer again and highlight some text or a link and right click and you should now have the option to call the number directly from your browser:

If you have done everything right, simply click on the “Gradwell Call” context menu option and your phone should start ringing right away.  Answer the call and you’ll hear the ringing of the destination number right away.

I might see about doing the same thing for Chrome and Firefox.

I’ve written a few little tools for the SPA series of phones but this one required a lot more effort. We’ve been using it internally for while now and it really does make using the phones so much easier and quicker.

It took me a while to figure out how to control the call functions of the phone, but I am very pleased with the results. Here is a screenshot of the main application window:

The program has a number of features to make working with the Linksys SPA 942 and the Cisco 504g easier, such as autocomplete dialing from the phone and applications personal directory and the ability to directly dial any number stored in the phones Dialed/Answered and Missed call logs.

We’ve also added the ability to dial any number stored in your windows clipboard, really handy when you are web browsing and just want to get hold of someone quickly without having to look back and forth between the phone and your screen.

You can import numbers from your own databases via the CSV import utility and easily build up your own contact database within the application and then export it for use on collegues machines.

We have put together a dedicated website for the application, if you use one of these phones I urge you to check it out to make your life easier!

SPA Call Manager Pro

So, I have rewritten the script in Powershell and it should now work on any system which has Powershell installed.  The new script is easier to read and includes support for SMTP over SSL, making the use of a Gmail account for sending the alerts very straightforward.

The whole process is very similar to the previous script, so if you used that one, this will be immediatly familiar.

Installation:

After you have downloaded the Zip file extract it to a folder on your server, e.g “C:\Script”

You will then need to edit the variables at the top of the script to make them appropriate for your environment:

If you do not specify an SMTPServer, it will default to localhost.  If you do not specify an SMTPPort it will default to port 25.

If you intend to use the script with a gmail account set:

$SMTPServer = “smtp.gmail.com”
$SMTPUser = Your gmail account name (without the @gmail.com part).
$SMTPPassword = Your gmail account password
$SMTPPort = 587
$EnableSSL = true

Test Email is functional

Now that you have the script installed open up a powershell prompt and run the script with the “testemail” parameter e.g:

c:\script\dellalerts.ps1 testemail

If everything is working properly you should receive a test alert in your inbox.

Setup Alerts from OpenManage

Once the email function has been tested you can go ahead and setup the script to run from open manage, simply run the script again with the “setup” parameter, and you should see something like this:

Testing

There are a few easy ways to test the script in practice with a real alert generated by OpenManage:

• Pop the side off the server casing, this will generate a chassis intrusion alert.
• If you have a dual powersupply system you can pull the power to one of the supplies and the server should report the power loss.

The problem with these methods is that you have to be in the same place as the server.  So I prefer to trigger a tempreture alert like this:

Just set the warning threshold to be a couple of degrees lower than your current reading.  Warning: If you have a thermal shutdown action configured, this could trigger that process off and shutdown your server.  Once you have received your test emails, set the tempreture wanrings back to default values.

Please let me know of any issues you have with the script and I will work on them as soon as possible.  I have installed this updated version on a number of systems and it is working well.

The download includes both the new version and the older VBScript version.

This version has had some cosmetic tweaks, includes a proper installer and has the ability to upload the directory to many phones.

There is a small charge of £1.95 for this software.

This has been tested and works with:

Linksys SPA941Linksys SPA942Linksys SPA962

A visitor to the blog called Steve has kindly posted some code on that post which enables the same functionality in Linux and I think it is worthy of its own post.

Before attempting to use the script you will need to download this perl script called sendEmail and that you have unix2dos installed.

The script accepts two arguments, which are setup or show.

“setup” will set the alerts action to the value of $alert_script which should be the full path to the script itself.
“show” will print the current alert settings for the system to the screen.

The code of the script is as follows, or you can download from here:

A good way to test the script is to temporarily set the “Temperature Maximum” to something low like 12 to trigger an alert.

Unfortunately all of my Linux machines are virtual machines so I cannot test or modify this script, so if anyone wants to give me SSH access to a server running OMSA, be my guest.

Again, big thanks to Steve for posting this and I am sure it will be useful to lots of people. This has also inspired me to make some improvements to my original Windows version.

We’ve been using the Linksys SPA942 handsets for a while and they have worked very well for us. One of the major annoyances for us and others is the inability to populate the personal directory automatically.

I’ve read a number of posts on how to use wget to issue to personal directory to the phone via a HTTP post and this seemed like a good solution. In particular this post and this post inspired me to see if I could create a solution using the same technique in VB.Net.

So I have put together a simple program which will allow you to load/save a personal directory to/from a tab delimited file or handset. There are loads of enhancements that could be made in order to make the application more sophisticated but this is really a first attempt, so please report any problems.  You will need .net framework 3.0 to run the tool.  I’ll put the project into a proper setup file if it is sufficiently popular.

Here is a screenshot of the utility:

Download the program from the newer post :

http://www.tachytelic.net/2011/01/updated-linksys-spa-personal-directory-manager/

I’m using firmware version 6.1.5a, I’d be interested to hear if this does/does not work on other versions or if anyone has any suggestions for enhancements.

This is also a great way to backup/restore your Linksys SPA handset – I factory reset my handset and this much easier than re-entering all the personal directory.

The function of the script is to perform scheduled reboots of Draytek routers.  Optionally is it possible to reboot the router only if a specified IP address does not respond to a ping request.  This is useful to test if a VPN connection is functioning, and only reboot the router if there is no response.

Early Draytek firmwares had a tendancy to lose VPN connectivity and a reboot is the only way to restore the connection.

First of you need to install the Toolsack Baseline components for this script to work:

http://www.toolsack.com/download/

The script needs to be supplied with parameters, so a typical command line would look like this:

cscript reboot.vbs 86.11.93.131 routerpassword

and a conditional command line would look like this:

cscript reboot.vbs 86.11.93.131 routerpassword 192.168.1.254

The 3rd argument will be tested for a ping response, if none is received then a reboot will be executed.

Here is the code, save it as reboot.vbs:

set args=wscript.arguments

If wscript.arguments.count=2 then
   IP=args.item(0)
   Password=args.item(1)
   call reboot(IP,Password)
elseif wscript.arguments.count=3 then
   IP=args.item(0)
   Password=args.item(1)
   TestIP=args.item(2)
   if ping(TestIP)=False then
      call reboot(IP,Password)
   end if
else
   wscript.echo "Invalid number of arguments specified"
   wscript.echo "Please specify router IP address & password and optional test IP"
end if

sub reboot(IP, Password)
   set s = CreateObject("Toolsack.Socket")
   s.Connect IP, 23
       s.Write Password & vbCrLf
   s.write "sys reboot" & vbcrlf
   s.write "quit" & vbcrlf
end sub

Function Ping(strHost)

    dim objPing, objRetStatus

    set objPing = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}").ExecQuery _
      ("select * from Win32_PingStatus where address = '" & strHost & "'")

    for each objRetStatus in objPing
        if IsNull(objRetStatus.StatusCode) or objRetStatus.StatusCode<>0 then
       Ping = False
        else
            Ping = True
        end if
    next
End Function 

I am always forgetting the syntax for the New-ExchangeCertificate cmdlet when I need to do a new certificate request so I decided to write a little bit of javascript to build up the command automatically. Its much easier to copy and paste it from here than work with in it the Exchange 2007 Command Shell.

So just fill in the fields below and the command will be built automatically in the box below. Then just copy into command shell. If required, seperate the “Subject Alternative Names” with commas.

CSR Command:

I am thinking of duplicating this code and writing another post which will generate the commands for the import of the newly generated certificate.

The software is capable of calling external programs or scripts when a server alert is triggered so I have written a simple script that provides E-Mail alert functionality.

There are a couple of scripts out there that do similar, but I wanted something self contained and capable of using SMTP Authentication with an external relay.

The other problem with OMSA is that you need to go into each individual alert to configure the settings which can be very time consuming, I wanted a way to add them all automatically as I am going to install the script on a number of servers.

Once you have downloaded and extracted the zip file you will need to edit the variables at the top of the script to make them appropriate for your environment:

The variables at the top define the e-mail settings and are hopefully self explanatory. If a remote SMTP server is not specified the local machine will be used to send the E-Mail.

Below these you can to decide what events you want to be notified of, just comment out any that you aren’t interested in, e.g:

AlertConfig(0)="powersupply|Power supply failure"
AlertConfig(1)="powersupplywarn|Power supply warning"
'AlertConfig(2)="tempwarn|Temperature warning"
'AlertConfig(3)="tempfail|Temperature failure"


I have included every alert available in OMSA 6.2 on a PE T710, some of these alerts won’t be available on older versions or machines.

After you have configured the script, I suggest you test that the E-Mail options by running:

cscript dellalert.vbs testemail

You should receive a test e-mail, if not something isn’t working properly.

When you have successfully tested e-mail, configure OMSA to send alerts by running:

cscript dellalert.vbs setup

You will then see the script go through and setup all the appropriate alerts as per your settings. This process can take a couple of minutes as the “omconfig” command takes a while. This step will not work if you do not have OMSA installed.

Once this is done you should be able to see that the script has been added into OMSA:

Now you need to generate some real alerts to test the script properly. How you do this will depend on the capabilities of your server, I was able to disconnect the redundant power supply and have an alert generated almost immediately. I think opening the case will also generate an event, but I am not sure as I didn’t test. Hopefully you should get something like this in your Inbox:

Update: There is a new version of this script which is written entirely in Powershell and will work with Windows Server Core etc.  Please visit :

http://www.tachytelic.net/2011/09/dell-openmanage-server-administrator-e-mail-alerts-updated-powershell-script/

Download both versions by following the PayPal link.

It sends an e-mail to a specified recipient reminding them to change the backup tape in a server. The SBS backup system does this automatically, so this is meant for use on SBS servers using something other than the in-built SBS backup.

Installation is simply a case of extracting the contents of this zip file to a folder on your SBS server and then changing the variables at the top of the script to appropriate values for your environment.

Once done you can test interactively from a command line by running “cscript tapereminder.vbs” and once you are happy with the results setup a scheduled task to do the job daily.