Active Directory sysvol Check script using Powershell Jobs

Question

I am working on a sysvol check script for active directory monitoring. Completed the script which checks connectivity to sysvol on all the domain controllers in the given domain. As part of this i am doing the below check

Start-Job -sb "(Measure-Command{Dir \\$DCName\sysvol\$Domain\Policies}).Milliseconds"

this returns the time taken in milliseconds; unfortunately it returns the time even the sysvol is inaccessible and its even faster compared to if its accessible, due to obvious reasons.

My question is when i do receive-Job , is there a way to find out if job has errors? because measure command doesn't give the whole picture. Please let me know if any other additional questions regarding this.

Seems like it would be far more straight forward if the share/path existed, then perform the throughput test. — Greg Askew, Nov 27 '15 at 18:38
Problem is i do entirely separate loop for receiving data for every completed job and write it to a file; if i skip a job because the path isn't there; i wont be receiving anything regarding that DC. Also my spreadsheet is a appending every-time i run the script by adding a new column labeled by current run time, so i don't have any control over cells to put data outside of jobs. Please let me know if my explanation doesn't make any sense ,i can explain. — Darktux, Nov 27 '15 at 19:05

Ryan Ries · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-29T19:58:42.210

First off, I don't understand your syntax. I'm running PS v5 on Windows 10 and your code snippet doesn't even run, because you fed Start-Job a string, not a script block. And -sb was not an acceptable alias/shorthand for -ScriptBlock for me.

But who knows, maybe that was legal in PS v4. That's beside the point.

You should add -ErrorAction Stop to your dir/gci/get-childitem cmdlet so that it produces a "terminating" error if it fails.

Behold, here is the job when I do not specify -ErrorAction Stop:

PS C:\> $MyJob = Start-Job -ScriptBlock { (Measure-Command{Dir \\$DCName\sysvol\$Domain\Policies}).Milliseconds }
PS C:\> $MyJob.State
Running
PS C:\> $MyJob.State
Completed

I won't know whether the job actually succeeded or failed. The state of the job simply goes from Running to Completed, regardless of the job's success.

Now let's try it again with a terminating error:

PS C:\> $MyJob = Start-Job -ScriptBlock { (Measure-Command{Dir \\$DCName\sysvol\$Domain\Policies -ErrorAction Stop}).Milliseconds }
PS C:\> $MyJob.State
Running
PS C:\> $MyJob.State
Failed

Now you see that the same job enters a state of Failed. You now know your job failed. In addition, if you were to save the results of the job with

PS C:\> $Result = Receive-Job $MyJob

$Result will be null if the job failed.

If you want to store the specific error that occurred within the job, try this:

PS C:\> Receive-Job $MyJob -ErrorVariable Result
PS C:\> $Result
Cannot find path '\\\sysvol\\Policies' because it does not exist.
+ CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (\\\sysvol\\Policies:String) [Get-ChildItem], ItemNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand
+ PSComputerName        : localhost

Ryan you are right, i didnt want to confuse y'all so shortened my syntax; below is the full version; $Block = "(measure-Command{Dir \\$DCName\sysvol\$Domain\Policies}).Milliseconds" $sb = [scriptblock]::Create($Block) Start-Job -ScriptBlock $sb -Name $DCName PS: Dang code notation is not at all working, tried to put 4 spaces at start still it shows normally. — Darktux, Dec 01 '15 at 14:02

Active Directory sysvol Check script using Powershell Jobs

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