More PST Import Utils - Get-ImportStatus & Lock-File

This is Part 7 in a series of posts about my experience tackling the migration of PST files.
The first post in the series is here.
The next post in this series is here.

Quicker Stats
We found the MailboxImport queue needs a little tender care from time to time. We always would run this command to get a quick understanding of what was going on in the queue:

Get-MailboxImportRequest | Get-MailboxImportRequestStatistics

Sometimes we needed :

Get-MailboxImportRequest -Status Failed | Resume-MailboxImportRequest

I really got tried of typing all that out all the time, so I created a short function for me.

Function Get-ImportStatus (){
      #---------------------------------------------------------
      # a helper function to display mailbox import info
      # option to show only a subset -- by batchname
      #      sometimes the list is just long
      # option to restart failed jobs --
      #      sometimes jobs failed because the service crashed on a bad PST file
      #      or too many jobs for one mailbox
      # option to restart suspended jobs
      #      the script can suspend jobs it thinks may be causing issues
      # option to suspend all jobs
      #      a single PST can crash the MB rep service and all jobs start over
      #      you can't tell exactly which is the culprit so suspend all jobs
      #      and investigate

      # left the -confirm off on purpose
     
      param (
             $Batch=$null,
              [switch]$RestartFailed,
              [switch]$RestartSuspended,
              [switch]$SuspendAll
       )
      If($Batch) {
              Get-MailboxImportRequest -BatchName $Batch |
              Get-MailboxImportRequestStatistics
       }
      ElseIf($RestartFailed.IsPresent) {
              Get-MailboxImportRequest -Status Failed |
              Resume-MailboxImportRequest
       }
      ElseIf($RestartSuspended.IsPresent) {
              Get-MailboxImportRequest -Status Suspended |
              Resume-MailboxImportRequest
       }
      ElseIf($SuspendAll.IsPresent) {
              Get-MailboxImportRequest |
              Suspend-MailboxImportRequest
       }
      Else {
              Get-MailboxImportRequest | Sort Name |
              Get-MailboxImportRequestStatistics
       }
     
}

Stepping all over each other
You now how it is, everyone gets busy and stops checking with others about what's going on and crap happens. The way we were handling the queue files became an issue. If two people ran the script, the last one to write was the winner. I noticed this when I tried to schedule a task and the queue was trashed. (Lots of manual fixing up there.) And there were a few other small disasters, too.

I remembered and old way to make sure one process did not step on the other, create a "lock" file when you started your work and then delete the "lock" file when you done.
This wasn't exactly elegant, but it works just fine. We're just doing this with a zero lenth file.

Simply check for the existance of the file (Test-PSTIQLock) and if false, lock the file (Lock-PSTIQ) process the queue and then remove the lock (Unlock-PSTIQ)



Introduction: The Beginings
Part 1: Script Requirements
Part 2: Add-PSTImportQueue
Part 3: Process-PSTImportQueue
Part 4: Some Tools we added
Part 5: Set-PSTImportQueue
Part 6: About PST Capture
Part 7: More PST Import Tools
Part 8: Using RoboCopy
Part 9: Morning Status Report
Part 10: Using BITS Transfer
Part 11: Get the script / Set up
Part 12: The Functions