Counting Resources Per Group

This post is now deprecated. The updated content is found here.

RDP Ping

UPDATE: This content is no longer maintained here. Instead go to https://github.com/sweenig/RDPing.

NQBackup

UPDATE 6/9/2015: Version 1.7 now released. This update adds standalone support. Since CA is including newer versions of MySQL in their products, DBToolv3 is no longer going to work. This change allows you to specify to use MySQLDump instead of DBToolv3. Essentially, you unremark line 15 and remove/remark line 14. If I get enthusiastic about it, I may update the script to allow a switch from the command line to specify which method to use. I'm just not there yet.
UPDATE 2/10/15: Version 1.6 now released. This update changes the way harvesters and DSAs are backed up, by only backing up the ReaperArchive, ReaperArchive15, and HarvesterArchive directories to a single directory (no redundant rolling backups). It only backs up files that have the archive bit set, so before running it the first time, set the archive bit for all the files in those directories. I also fixed the date naming method so it's YYYYMMDD instead of YYYYDDMM. I also added timestamping to the log so you know how long it takes to perform the file backups vs. the database backups.
UPDATE 2/27/14: Version 1.5 now released. This version doesn't have too many changes. I just added the lines below that allow the NFA mess of data files to be backed up along with everything else. This one script can still be used on any product. However, when running on a Harvester or DSA, extra commands backup the data files.
The syntax for running the tool hasn't changed since 1.4 (but 1.4 introduces some major changes), so you should be able to drop the script in place without changing any scheduled tasks.

nqbackup.bat <dbname> <num_backups_to_keep>

Remember, if you need a reminder how to run the tool, just run it without any arguments (or just double click it from Windows Explorer).

Custom Formula: IPFromDEC (IP address from decimal)

THIS CONTENT IS NOW HOSTED ON GITHUB: https://github.com/sweenig/ipfromdec/

Extending Windows URL handling for SSH, RDP, and SCP

THIS CONTENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO GITHUB: https://github.com/sweenig/urlextender

SNMPGet for Windows and Community String Discovery

I recently needed to test SNMP connectivity from a Windows server to a device to prove that there was a problem outside my system causing SNMP polling to fail. Linux has NetSNMP, which comes with a command line snmpget utility. Windows has no such utility. A quick search on the internet helped with that. I found a utility from SNMPSoft, but of course I had to build a wrapper for it.



The wrapper is pretty simple since my objective is to do a quick check of SNMP connectivity. The version and the OID polled are hard coded to v2c and sysObjectID.

This could be used to discovery which community strings work on a system by using for loops in the command line. For example, if you wanted to test a bunch of community strings:

for %A in (public string1 string2 string3 string4 etc) do @snmpdiscover hostname %A

This will output something like this:

Host:localhost Community:public
1.3.6.1.4.1.311.1.1.3.1.1

Host:localhost Community:string1
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:string2
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:string3
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:string4
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:etc
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

In this case, the first community string (public) worked, while the others didn't.

Enabling or Disabling the Flow Cloner in RA9.0

I know, 9.0 is an old version, but I had a customer who is transitioning and needed to temporarily enable and disable cloning of flows from the old harvesters to the new harvesters. Here's the resulting script. The first argument should be Y or N depending on whether you want to enable (Y) or disable (N) the flow cloner. The second argument is optional and is the IP address you want to clone to. If you specify the IP address, the flowclonedef.ini file is created. If you don't specify it, no changes are made.

Creating a Security Camera Page for the iPad

I may have posted before about the Foscam cameras I have around my house. I have one inside the house and three outside, covering all the doors. There are a myriad of apps out there that allow you to view live streams from Foscam cameras, however, most of them are either designed for iPhone (thus for iPad you have to use pixel doubling, which sucks) and/or they have a bunch of chrome that I'd rather not waste screen real estate showing.

A couple years ago I bought one of the first generation iPads. It was great, but given the OS upgrades that it's missing out on and the low resources that most modern apps blow right past, it's become less and less used. I decided to get some more use out of it by building a small web page with custom controls to stream each of my cameras' feeds to the iPad. The thought was to mount the iPad near the front door so that I could do a quick check of all the cameras while walking to the front door to answer a caller (since one of the cameras looks at the front door, I'd also get a quick look at the caller without looking through the peephole). After looking around at some of the DIY options, I decided to go with a Luxone iPad Wall Mount since they had one specifically built for the 1st generation iPad. It was more expensive than some of the DIY options, but the finished product looks cleaner (IMO). The place where I had decided to mount the iPad had a light switch right below it. A quick test with the multimeter showed that power is run to the switch instead of the light, so I could wire in an iPad charger which would draw power regardless of the state of the light switch. Fast forward a couple of hours and I had made some room in the circuit box for the iPad charger, soldered on some leads which were wired into the switch's hot wires and ran the iPad cable up and out of the switch to the wall mount. The end result is that the iPad sits in a landscape position and always has power. A quick change of the config so that it never auto-locks and the iPad stays on 24/7.

As for the page, I had several web servers around were I could host the page. It didn't take much to design the page, but I wanted some extra fun. I decided that tapping on a camera feed should blow the feed up to the full size of the screen. Tapping again would shrink it down to its original size. This was easily accomplished with a bit of CSS. Essentially, there are three things in the CSS:

1. The standard classes that setup the body
2. An option that sets the initial size of each stream and specifies the timing function for CSS animations.
3. 4 classes that determine where the streams sit
4. 2 classes that are tied to the animation (one to grow one to shrink)
5. 2 animations (one to grow one to shrink)

After that, there's a simple javascript that does two main things depending on whether the image is its original size or has been blown up to full screen:

1. Switch to the other class so that the animation happens
2. Set the final style parameters of the stream so it stays the way it is at the end of the animation

Then there are the streams themselves. I added username and password parameters to the URLs so they don't have to be typed in every time. There were some other parameters that I added so that when I saved a bookmark to the home screen it would open up and look like an app. The details are here. I really only added <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> and <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black-translucent">. Then I pulled up the page in Safari, added a shortcut from there to my home screen and closed Safari. Now when I open using the shortcut, it opens up as if it were a separate app from Safari and none of the Chrome is there.

Pinewood Derby Race Track Timer

This content is now being hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/sweenig/pinewoodderbytimer/

Putting a Hidden Help Section on a Web Page

Continuing in a series of posts, here's how to add a hidden div to a web page (and make it visible on demand).

For the health check report, I had built a way to transform the output of the script into a usable report and added editable content so that the report could be further tweaked after rendering the page. Given that others would eventually be using the report, I needed to add a way to help non-coders when inserting content into the report so that it looked cogent and coherent. Thus the help section.

However, I couldn't put a help section on the final report, that wouldn't look good when the report was delivered to the customer. So, I had to create a way for the help section to be normally hidden, with a button or link to display the help section. Also, the button had to be hidden!

Let's start with the help section itself. Take a look at the XSLT itself. The help section is simply a DIV containing the help content, with some special CSS applied to hide it until needed. Look at line 22. Notice that the display style is set to none. This hides the DIV entirely and collapses the space around it. It's as if the DIV isn't even there.

Now for a button to show the div when needed. Look at line 15 and you'll see an image with an onclick function. The function is contained in the external JavaScript file (lines 23-29). The JavaScript simply toggles the display style from none to block and back. Really, it wouldn't be too much to just put that function right in the img tag itself, but since I already had the external JS file, it was just as easy this way.

Another look at line 15 will show that the img is contained within a div with id="helptoggler". That div has three lines of CSS that essentially make it invisible until the mouse hovers over it and also puts it in the top left corner of the page:

1. #helptoggler {position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;}
2. #helptoggler > img {visibility:hidden;width:32px;height:auto;}
3. #helptoggler:hover > img {visibility:visible;}

This means that the image is in the top left corner of the page, is hidden until moused over, and when clicked shows the help section.

Since the JavaScript is built as a toggler, the same function can be called anywhere a link is desired to hide the help section. Clicking on the image in the top left corner hides the DIV, but notice that within the help section itself is a span with an onclick action calling the same JavaScript function (line 24).

Once again, if you want to play with the files themselves, just download, unzip, and open the XML file in IE.

Displaying Editable Content on a Web Page

In my previous post, I detailed how I went about transforming an XML document into a readable report, displaying data from the XML. If you downloaded and tried out the files, you should have noticed that the final report was more than I described.

Particularly, there were two things I glossed over:

1. There are several boxes on the page that have edit buttons and can be modified after the page is rendered.
2. There is a hidden div that shows the report author how to format additional content so that it shows up with the same style as the rest of the content on the page.

I'll cover #2 at a later time. Right now, I wanted to talk about how the editable content was built. Remember, the point of the project was to build a final report that could be delivered to the customer. A script was used to gather a bunch of data and output it to XML. An XSLT was used to transform that information into a more readable format. While the script was good at gathering much of the information needed, it didn't go into wordy detail about the recommended changes to be made. Thus a method of adding to the document was needed.  

Initially, I built a section of the XML that would allow the user to input all the information needed right into the XML. That way, the XML transformation and PDF generation would be the last step in generating the report. However, that wasn't too sexy and I still found myself needing a way to edit the content after it was rendered.

So, I came up with EditableContent. This comprised of a few components. Here is what part of the code looks like:

1. <h2>Summary Recommendations</h2>
2.     <div id="recsummary" class="editablecontent">
3.      <img src="health_check_files/edit-icon.png" onclick="editcontent('recsummary','recsummary_content')" />
4.      <div id="recsummary_content">
5.       <xsl:if test="reportinfo/recsummary!=''"><xsl:value-of select="reportinfo/recsummary" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></xsl:if>
6.       <xsl:if test="not(reportinfo/recsummary) or (reportinfo/recsummary='')">Provide a summary description of your recommendations<br /><span class="example">EXAMPLE</span>: The primary recommendations resulting from the data gathering, assessment, and analysis performed during this Health Check are to upgrade both hardware and software on the core NMS components of the infrastructure. In addition to hardware and software upgrades, a review of the alarm/event management process is recommended. Architecturally, the NMS deployment is in accordance with a “Best Practices” implementation for an organization of this size.</xsl:if>
7.      </div>
8.     </div>

First is the div containing the content. This div has a unique id and uses a CSS class of 'editablecontent'. This CSS class is what puts the red line around the editable content and also puts the edit button. Click here to see the CSS (pay attention to lines 63-85).

The main DIV has two children, the edit image and the content DIV. The edit button has some special CSS that make it only visible when the mouse moves over the parent DIV. The child DIV is the one containing the content.

Notice the image has a JavaScript function attached. The JavaScript is contained in a separate file (but could just have easily been included in the XSLT). The JavaScript simply switches from a static DIV to an editable textarea box and back again. Depending on which save button is pressed, the JavaScript will return to a DIV that looks like a draft or a final version.

Adding editable content to the XSLT all over the place made it easy to use the data from the XML but have a last minute override for any of the content (i.e. to fix a single misspelling without editing the XML manually).

To see it all in action, download the files, unzip, and open the XML file in IE.

XML and XSLT: Transforming Raw XML into Readable Reports

THIS CONTENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO GITHUB: https://github.com/sweenig/xml_and_xslt

Combining All Files into a Single Batch

One thing I figured out how to do was to simplify the installation of a complex set of files that are used as auxiliary files for a master batch file.  For example, for the tool that I built over the last few weeks, I ended up with gatherer.vbs, entitycleaner.pl, and tsv2csv.pl that were all called from within the master batch file.  While I was developing things, it was handy to have these as individual files because I could easily edit them individually.  However, when installing the tool on the final server where it needed to go, I had to zip up all the files (including some other files that I haven't released yet), copy them over, and unzip them (replacing the existing ones if they were already there).  This wasn't too efficient and I needed an easier way to transmit the scripts.

The solution I came up with was to embed the contents of the auxiliary files into the master batch file.  I then instructed the master batch file to echo the auxiliary file contents into the files at runtime.  This meant that I only had to transmit the single batch file to the target server and run it.  When it ran, it would create the files it needed, use them, then destroy them.  This also kept the working directory clean.

There were a few caveats, however.  The biggest hurdle is trying to echo the special characters that other programming languages use from within a batch file.  There were two main resources that I used to make sure things worked right.  The first is Rob VanDerWoude's web page on escaping special characters.  This helped me determine which characters from the source script would have to be escaped when echoing out from the batch file to the auxiliary file.  The second utility I used was http://text-compare.com/.  It allows you to compare one text file to another and tells you where the differences are.

The next thing I did was create a simple batch file to echo each line of the content out to a new file.  I then took the original content and compared it to the content created by the simple batch file.  For example, for tsv2csv.pl on the left, I created the batch file on the right:

You can see that the batch file on the right uses the carat (^) to escape several of the characters.  Since I used one redirector at the end (line 11) to output the entire thing into the test output file, lines 2-10 needed to be in parenthesis.  This means that all parentheses needed to be escaped.  Also, since > and < are redirectors in Windows Command, they also had to be escaped.  Interestingly enough, since the > on line 8 is in double quotes, it doesn't need to be escaped.  This is only possible since I needed the double quotes anyway in the auxiliary file.  If I had used single quotes on line 8, I would have had to escape the >.

In this way, I combined all the auxiliary files into one single batch file.  I added the lines from the test batch file into a function in the master and called the function from the main program section of the master batch.

Some other characters that have to be escaped are the ampersand (&), pipe (|), and percent (%).  The & and | were easily escaped.  However % proved to be more difficult.  Normally, the % sign is followed by a non-alphanumeric character (space or punctuation).  However, when trying to output a date format for SQL, the % sign is followed by characters (i.e. %Y-%m-%d).  This causes a problem because Windows command is reads each of those a variables.  You can't even escape them because in a batch file, the double percent (%%Y) reads as a variable too.  In the end, what I had to do was store 'Y' in a variable called 'FormatY' like this:

set formatY=Y
echo %%%formatY%

The first two percent signs read as an escaped percent sign and a single % is echoed.  The %formatY% resolves to Y and a single Y is output.  To get the whole string, I did this:

set formatY=Y
set formatm=m
set formatd=d
set formatH=H
set formati=i
set formats=s
echo %%%formatY%-%%%formatm%-%%%formatd% %%%formatH%:%%%formati%:%%%formats%

The output looks like this:

%Y-%m-%d %H:%i:%s

This is a messy way of doing things, but it works.

Convert Tab Separated Values to Comma Separated Values

Using MySQL to output CSV files can be a bit of a pain.  You have two options depending on where you want the file to end up.  If you want to write the file to the server, you can append your query with a bunch of lines detailing what separator character to use, what file name to output to, and what text delimiter to use.  This is great if you want the file to be on the server.  However, if you're accessing MySQL remotely, you usually want the file to be saved locally.  This is fairly easy, but the simple method only outputs in a tab separated values file instead of comma separated.  Since I wanted CSV, I designed a short Perl script to go through a TSV and change all the tabs to commas.  This is very similar to the entities cleaner posted earlier.



Line 2 opens the file specified in the first argument.  Line 3 sets up the variables.  Lines 4-9 replace the \t character with a comma.  Lines 10-11 close the input file and open the same file as the output file (using clobber to overwrite the original contents).  Line 12 outputs the cleaned lines to the output file and line 13 closes the file.

Entity Cleaner

The entity cleaner was a workaround for a problem I didn't want to take more time to resolve.  I have a script that queries a MySQL database and outputs an html table.  This works great, however, I wanted to be able to format some of the content in the table, in this case, align the text to the right side of the cell.  The code to right align the content was easy.  However, when MySQL outputted the HTML, the HTML I had added was converted into HTML entites.  So, instead of showing the content right aligned, it showed all the markup around the content.  So, I needed to do some post processing of the file to convert the HTML entities to their actual characters.  This Perl script was the answer.  Since my output only contained three entites, they are the only ones I replace here.  However, this could be easily expanded to include all the basic entities.

Line 2 gets the input file name and stores it for later use.  Line 3 sets up the array that will contain the content as it's being cleaned.  Line 4 sets up a counter.  Line 6 opens the file.  Lines7-14 clean the entities.  Line 8 grabs the next single line from the input file.  Line 9 stores that line in the corresponding element in the array.  Line 10 replaces the &lt; with <.  Line 11 replaces the &gt; with >.  Line 12 replaces &quot; with ".  Line 13 moves us to the next line.

Lines 15-18 closes the intput file, sets the output file to the input file (change in place) and opens the file for outputting.

Lines 19-23 output the contents of the array to the output file and give a confirmation message.

Gatherer

One of the major pieces of the tool that I spent the last few weeks working on is the gatherer.  It's written in Visual Basic since it was the easiest thing to use without installing additional modules (like I would have had to do with Perl).  The purpose of this script is to download a file via http and save it locally.  I used a modified version of this final script in my tool.

The script must be called with 2 arguments.  The first is the name of the server to fetch from.  The second is the file to fetch.  This is a simplified version of my script.  It could be simplified further to just provide a URL instead of the two pieces.  If you want that, tell me in the comments and I'll modify it and post it.

Line 7 takes the first argument and stores it in the targetServer variable.  Lines 8-9 build the final URL to fetch.  This is where the simplification could be made to just fetch a provided URL.

Lines 10-13 actually fetch the file and echo back the response code.  Lines 14-16 check that response code for any errors and exit the script with an ERRORLEVEL of 1 if there was a problem.  The only thing this doesn't check for is 'Server not found' errors.  Maybe I'll look into that problem later.

Lines 17-32 execute if the HTTP response code doesn't indicate a problem.  Lines 18-24 get the current working directory so that the downloaded file can be saved there.  Lines 25-31 actually save the file.  The file is saved with a modified file name in the format [servername][originalfilename].

Batch File Template

I've done some major work over the last few weeks with batch files.  In fact, I just finished a tool that utilizes 5 different languages (Windows batch, Perl, VBScript, HTML, & SQL) to accomplish some pretty cool stuff.  In the process of building the tool, I had to set some standards in the way I work with the various programming languages.
One major step was to finalize (at least in my mind) my method of writing batch files.  So, I came up with the following template that I'll probably use for any projects going forward.  I'll explain the various features:



The first section of code (lines 2-7) sets the default variables that this script will use.  This section can be used to declare the default value for any number of variables.  It also sets the current version and last updated date.

The next section (lines 8-19) branches out to the built in help.  This will not execute the main program and instead will go to the help section (lines 42-51) and execute the code there.  Most of the time, I just put echo statements there to echo the help documentation out to the screen.  The GOTO:EOF simply returns execution control to the calling process.  For help this means returning to the command prompt.  If some arguments are required, you can easily branch to the help section by unREMarking line 9.  This will execute the help commands and exit if no arguments are specified.  This is handy because you can then just run the batch file without any arguments and see the help (the way most built in commands work).

The next section (lines 20-26) reads in the command line arguments.  If the switches for variable1 and variable2 are present, the value immediately after the switch is read into the variable (for numbers and strings).  If the switch for variable3 is present, variable3 is set to 1 (boolean).  The shift and GOTO Loop commands cycle through all the arguments until none remain (line 21).

The next section (lines 27-35) is the main section of the program.  The first thing that happens is that the version is echoed by calling the version function (lines 52-54).  In this case, :version acts like a function (with no returning value).  This is handy since version can be called multiple times in different places in the main program execution (for example outputting the version at the end of any output files).  The version function can be extended to include author information or links to online documentation.

The next section (lines 39-41) is a custom function that is called from the main program.  It is called on line 34 with one argument.  Normally arguments separated by a space are treated as two, but these are surrounded by double quotes, which makes it one.  The %~1 on line 40 grabs that argument and outputs the argument without quotes.

Device level context switching

UPDATE: I've developed some code to make this a regular view that can be dragged onto the page without any configuration required.  The following code will create the standalone view and add it to all four device context pages:

---

UPDATE: I've rewritten this widget to make it easier to implement.  Now instead of having to specify the {Item.ItemID} variable in the browser view URL, the widget just grabs the information from the parent URL.  This is also better because any additional arguments you had in the URL will continue through to the other context pages.  Here's the updated code:
<!--(C) 2012 Stuart Weenig source http://stuart.weenig.com--> <script type="text/javascript"> //get the parent url parameters var parenturl=parent.document.location.search; parenturl=parenturl.replace('?',''); var argsarray=parenturl.split('&'); var argsmatrix = new Array(argsarray.length); for (var i = 0; i < argsarray.length; i++){ argsmatrix[i] = new Array(2); argsmatrix[i] = argsarray[i].split('='); } //argsmatrix now holds all arguments var pagecontext; var urlprefix='<a target=\'_top\' href=\'/npc/Default.aspx?'; for (var j = 0; j < argsmatrix.length; j++){ if (argsmatrix[j][0] != 'pg'){ urlprefix = urlprefix + argsmatrix[j][0] + '=' + argsmatrix[j][1] + '&'; } else { pagecontext = argsmatrix[j][1]; } } if (pagecontext != 'r') {document.write(urlprefix + 'pg=r\'>Router</a> '); } else { document.write('Router '); } if (pagecontext != 'sw') {document.write(urlprefix + 'pg=sw\'>Switch</a> '); } else { document.write('Switch '); } if (pagecontext != 'd') {document.write(urlprefix + 'pg=d\'>Device</a> '); } else { document.write('Device '); } if (pagecontext != 's') {document.write(urlprefix + 'pg=s\'>Server</a> '); } else { document.write('Server '); } </script>  <a href="http://stuart.weenig.com/2012/08/device-level-context-switching.html" target="_blank"><img src="/npc/images/DialogQuestion.gif" border=0></a>

Now all you have to do is point to this widget in your custom content directory.

Enjoy!

---

You may not know about it, but NPC classifies every device as either a router, switch, server, or device.  The device category is for every type of device that isn't a router, switch, or server.  This is too bad because NetVoyant actually has an extendable list of device classifications; you can make as many as you want.  However any additional classes will show up in NPC as 'devices' because NPC doesn't understand them.  This is fine in most cases.  However, certain cases will cause problems.

For example, if I have an F5 load balancer and I'm monitoring the device in SuperAgent as well as NetVoyant, NPC has to choose whether to classify the device as a server (as SuperAgent reports it) or as a device (since NetVoyant either classifies it as 'other' or 'load balancers' if you've classified it).  Turns out the NV classification is last on the list.  If a device is monitored by RA or SA, NPC will classify it as a router or server, respectively, regardless of what classification exists in NV.

In this case, what I usually do is instruct customers how to switch from one context page to another after drilling in.  For example, after I drill into the F5 and get to the server page, I would update the URL to read pg=d instead of pg=s.  This loads the device page for the F5 instead of the server page.  This can be handy since the device page may have specific F5 views on it that don't appear on the server page.
In order to make this easier, I built a simple html page that can be loaded into a browser view that will allow quick switching between all four context view types.  Here's the page:

<html>
<script type="text/javascript">
var url1='<a target="_top" href="/npc/Default.aspx?pg=';
var str=location.search;
str=str.replace("?ItemID=","");
document.write(url1 + 'r' + '&DeviceID=' + str + '">Router</a> ');
document.write(url1 + 'sw' + '&DeviceID=' + str + '">Switch</a> ');
document.write(url1 + 'd' + '&DeviceID=' + str + '">Device</a> ');
document.write(url1 + 's' + '&DeviceID=' + str + '">Server</a> ');
&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="http://stuart.weenig.com/2012/08/device-level-context-switching.html"><img src="/npc/images/DialogQuestion.gif" border=0></a>

</script>
</html>

Link to this page from a browser view with a title like 'View this device as a...' and a URL like this:

/content/viewdeviceas.html?ItemID={Item.ItemID}

As long as this page is named 'viewdeviceas.html' and it's hosted under a virtual directory on NPC's IIS web server with an alias of 'content' it should load just fine.  Give it a height of 33, turn off the border and hide the scroll bars.  This makes an excellent small browser view that can go right at the top of the page, displayed right under the page tabs.

Checking if a TCP Port is Open on a Remote Server using Powershell

This tip is related to a previous post about using a utility called TCPing.exe to check to see if a remote port is open (i.e. the service is listening and accepting connections).  Since Windows 2008 doesn't come with the telnet client installed and since some circumstances will mean that access to the internet isn't available (i.e. a server in a hardened data center), an alternative method is to use Powershell.

This can be wrapped into a script pretty easily, or if you just memorize it, you can impress whomever is looking over your shoulder.

So, memorize this bit (this will ping 192.168.0.1:80):
$socket = new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient $socket.Connect("192.168.0.1",80) $socket.Connected

If the output is "True", then then the tcping was successful.  If the connection is unsuccessful, it will be completely obvious in the output.

To wrap it into a script, create a text file like this (this will ping proxyserver.domain.com:8080 by default. Pass the server name and port to override the default.

param( [String]$server="proxyserver.domain.com", [String]$port=8080 ) $socket = new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient $socket.Connect($server, $port) if ($socket.Connected) { $status = "Open" $socket.Close() } else { $status = "Not Open" } $status

Setting a default group for an NPC report page

UPDATE: An additional tool now available: autorefresh.html.  This widget uses its own script to handle automatically refreshing a page.  It does not call the built in Auto-Refresh capability of NPC.  You provide the number of minutes between refreshes in the browser view url: /custom/autorefresh.html?interval=5

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UPDATE: An additional tool now available for download lets you set the default timeframe for a page. Do you have a page that you always want to show the last 24 hours of data? Just add this widget.

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UPDATE: The newest version is out.  I updated the script to fix a problem when going back to NPC when a page using the default page context setter was used.  I also have released a modified version that allows you to set the default IP SLA test type on an IP SLA test report page.

Page IPSLA Type Default

Page Group Default