VMWare Workstation 16 Pro on Windows 10 Shared Folders Not Available In Linux Guest

 This is a small problem with an easy fix, but I wanted to document it for others.

Running VMWare Workstation 16 Pro on Windows 10 Pro, when you create a Linux guest VM with Shared Folders enabled, the shared folders don't always show up in the guest VM. In the guest VM, you should see any shared folders under /mnt/hgfs. The problem is that they aren't seen there, even if you reboot the guest VM. The silly fix is to disable shared folders for the VM from VM->Settings->Options and SAVE that. Then go back into VM->Settings->Options and enable shared folders and SAVE that. Your shared folders should now be available under /mnt/hgfs. 

We're still your go-to experts for all IBM ITSM products

 While we've been posting about other products, our primary focus remains the IBM suite of ITSM tools, such as:

IBM Tivoli Monitoring

ITCAM

Netcool Operations Insight (and the individual products that make it up)

Watson AIOps

Instana

Our consultants have decades of experience in ITSM and ESM, and we can ensure that your implementation is successful.

Deleting newlines or merging two lines in a file using Notepad++

It took me longer than it should have to find this link explaining how to delete a newline or merge two lines in Notepad++:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11084086/notepad-merge-2-lines-into-1-line

Here's the text from the answer in case the above link disappears at some point:

Use the extended replace functionality and replace "\r\nname" with " name"

Substitute appropriate line ending characters for \r\n depending on the file.

If it is from windows, use \r\n

If it is from unix, use \n

If it is from mac, use \r

Basically, you need to find and replace the appropriate characters, and it works just like one would expect. Finding the complete set of correct characters was the key for me. Specifically, I wasn't finding "\r\n" (CRLF, the Windows newline characters). Using the above, I was able to successfully delete some spurious newlines in my data.

A new book on ServiceNow Event Management is available!

I just published my first book, Migrating to ServiceNow Event Management. In it, I provide tips and recommendations for migrating from an existing event management system to ServiceNow ITOM Event Management. The book provides details on some of the differences that exist between ServiceNow and event management systems that are not integrated with a CMDB. A large part of the book is devoted to the organizational information you need to capture to ensure a successful migration. 

It's available on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08X31Y1B8

Call PowerShell script from batch file using a pseudo here file

 If you made it through the title of this post, you're in the right place. Due to security restrictions on a Windows 10 machine I was using, I needed to run a group of PowerShell commands in a single command from a batch file, and I found the solution here:

https://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/powershell-script-in-a-bat-file/

Basically, you enclose the whole set of commands in curly braces, encode those to a Base64 string, then pass that encoded string to the PowerShell command with the -EncodedCommand parameter. This encoded string is the "pseudo here file" mentioned in the title.

I needed the same code run every time, so the manual step of copy-and-pasting the encoded string wasn't a problem for me. If you need to programattically modify the code that needs to run, you're on your own. 

ServiceNow Event Rules: No support for If..Then..Else in regex

The Transform and Compose Alert Output section of an Event Rule in ServiceNow allows you to use regular expressions and grouping to parse data in incoming events. Almost full regular expression support is provided, but I wanted to point out one feature that's definitely not supported as of the Paris release: if..then..else conditionals. Here's a great description of this feature from regularexpressions.info. Basically, the format of this conditional is:

(?(condition)(then)|(else))

It's somewhat esoteric, but it can be useful in cases where you have two different string formats that you want to parse in a single event rule. I just tested this thoroughly on my dev instance, and it absolutely is not supported. While you can save the event rule with this syntax, you'll eventually see an error stating:

Invalid Regular Expression Field

I believe this is due to the fact that the regular expression engine does not support "lookbehind" (limitation documented here). In any case, it's not supported. I just wanted to document my findings here to save others a little headache.

Update 1/3/2021

The official name for this is Conditional Lookahead. You can play around with it at http://regex101.com if you're interested. 

And to make sure I was doing it correctly, I also tried this syntax in the Event Rule transform:

(?(?=my_pattern)(\d+)|(\w+))

This works in regex101, but gives the Invalid Regular Expression Field in the ServiceNow interface.

ServiceNow ITOM Health - Using a complex algorithm to bind an Alert to a CI

 By default with ServiceNow ITOM Health Event Management, an Alert is bound to a CI following this flowchart:

In 95-99% of implementations, you should work to configure components appropriately to leverage the above flow. 

However, there are some number of unique cases where you need to do something extremely specific that falls outside of the above decision-making process. For those cases, you will want to modify one or more of the Advanced Scripts under Event Management->Settings in the navigator. Specifically, to change the bound CI, you would modify the EvtMgmtCustom_PostBind_Create script to suit your needs. In this script, you can do anything you want to the alert GlideRecord before it's actually written to the database. 

Read the warnings in the script definition to realize that you do NOT want to modify this script unless you know what you're doing and have some very efficient code to run. But for those few cases where you need to set the bound CI according to some esoteric algorithm, this script is where it can be done.