Lability tutorial

A tutorial for working with Lability

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Chapter 3: Debugging

In this chapter, we discuss debugging problems with a Lability configuration.

Last tested: NEVER

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Debugging problems before Start-Lab

If Lability is throwing errors before you start your lab, you will have to go spelunking in Powershell’s $Error variable.

Deleting existing virtual disks before redeploying

Windows file locking semantics 🙄

If you deploy a lab, find a problem, and need to redploy, you may find that the lab’s virtual disks (found in $env:LabilityDifferencingVhdPath) are locked. This will result in an error when Lability tries to overwrite them with a new version.

To get around this, you basically just have to wait for a few seconds and try again. I found myself having to do this so often that I automated it. This short script will attempt to delete the CLIENT1 VHD from our previous chapter ever two seconds. When it’s finished, it will run Start-LabConfiguration.

WARNING: You should check the contents of $env:LabilityDifferencingVhdPath before running this script! That location contains virtual disks for all VMs across all labs on your machine, so if there are other VMs whose names start with CLIENT, it will delete their disks as well.

$diskFilenamePrefix = "CLIENT1"
do {
    Remove-Item -Path "${env:LabilityDifferencingVhdPath}\${diskFilenamePrefix}*" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Force
    sleep 2
} while (Get-ChildItem -Path "${env:LabilityDifferencingVhdPath}\${diskFilenamePrefix}*")
Start-LabConfiguration -ConfigurationData $configData -Verbose -Credential $adminCred

Filtering $Error

Lability emits dozens of non-halting errors even when everything is working correctly. For instance, it frequently checks for a CustomMedia.json file, and records an error if that file doesn’t exist. (You can use that file to define custom Windows installation media; see the about_Media help topic for more information.)

When troubleshooting, I’ve found it helpful to filter $Error like this:

$Error | Where-Object -FilterScript {
    $_ -NotMatch 'CustomMedia.json' -and
    $_ -NotMatch 'HKLM:\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\PowerShell\\3\\DSC'

This still contains some noise, but cuts out dozens and dozens of errors that are probably not part of whatever problem you are having.

Using Show-ErrorReport.ps1

To make this a bit more readable, I have included a Show-ErrorReport.ps1 script below. This takes the records in $Error and makes them more easily read by humans. This script is entirely optional, so if there is some other way you prefer to investigate $Error records, by all means skip it.

You can run the script as simple .\Show-ErrorReport.ps1 and it will report on all errors. To filter the errors as we do above, you could run it like this instead:

.\Show-ErrorReport.ps1 -ErrorList $($Error | Where-Object -FilterScript {
    $_ -NotMatch 'CustomMedia.json' -and
}) | more

Debugging a lab VM that never shows the logon screen

When you run the Start-Lab command, Lability starts all the VMs it created for your lab. You can launch the Hyper-V Manager application and see the virtual console for each VM. The console will display the Hyper-V logo and a spinner while the machine is applying the DSC configuration, and will show the logon screen once the DSC configuration is fully applied. Unfortunately, if the DSC configuration does not complete successfully, the logon screen will never appear, and there will be no obvious way to troubleshoot problems.

This section describes troubleshooting methods that I turn to when this happens.

The sledgehammer - reset the VM

Resetting the VM (right click on the VM -> Reset) is akin to pulling the power out of a physical computer and then turning it back on.

This means that your configuration will not have finished applying, and potentially something could have gotten corrupted. It also has the useful side effect of booting to a logon screen, because DSC only tries to apply the configuration at first boot.

Once you’ve done this, the machine will reboot, and you can log on and try to determine the source of the problem.

Relevant logs

There are two places to check for logs:

  1. Lability logs to a file in the C:\Bootstrap directory called Bootstrap-<DATESTAMP>.log

  2. Powershell DSC logs to the Windows event system, visible in Event Viewer under Applications and Services Logs\Microsoft\Windows\Desired State Configuration

Powershell remoting

If your VM came up enough to get an IP address, and it is on an Internal or External (but not Private) Hyper-V switch, then you may be able to log on using Powershell Remoting (which uses Windows Remote Management, or WinRM, under the hood).

(This is a great reason to configure networking as early as possible in your DSC configurations!)

To attempt this, follow the following steps:

  1. Get the IP address of the VM
  2. Configure your host to allow insecure WinRM connections to the VM with something like Set-Item -Path WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -Value <VM IP address>
  3. Connect to the VM with Enter-PSSession

These steps are laid out in more detail in Powershell Remoting

If that worked, you are now connected to the VM and can explore its filesystem, including the Bootstrap log referenced above.

Command-line access to event logs

You can use the wevtutil.exe command to query the Event Log from the command line. This is usable over a PSRemoting session. Here are some examples:

  1. Show help

    wevtutil.exe /?
  2. Show all events from the Application log as text (earliest events at the top)

    wevtutil.exe query-events Application /format:text
  3. Show the most recent 10 events in the Application log (earliest events at the bottom)

    wevtutil.exe query-events Application /format:text /reversedirection:true /count:10
  4. List all logs on the machine

    wevtutil.exe enum-logs
  5. Show the most recent 10 events in the DSC operational log (earliest events at bottom)

    wevtutil.exe query-events Microsoft-Windows-DSC/Operational /format:text /reversedirection:true /count:10

Resource ordering

If you wish to use Powershell remoting, it is worth paying extra attention when writing your DSC configurations. You should try to bring up network interfaces as quickly as possible, and leave failure-prone resources to the end of the configuration.

This reduces the chance that a resource fails before the VM has joined the network, maximizing the likelihood that Powershell Remoting will be available when you need it.

Lab exercises and files

  1. Explore the Show-ErrorReport script included here. Generate some errors in Powershell, use Show-ErrorReport to see the errors, and compare the output of that script with the result of merely typing $Error at the prompt.

    Note that Show-ErrorReport works with any Powershell error, and has no logic specific to Lability.

  2. Filter errors for the Show-ErrorReport script. Since Show-ErrorReport is not specific to Lability, you can generate your own errors for filtering. For instance, you might try:

    • Listing nonexistent directories like Get-ChildItem -Path C:\nonexistent
    • Throwing errors directly with throw "this is an error"
  3. Modify the example configuration from Chapter 2 to hang at the Hyper-V boot screen.

    One way to do that might be to change the xComputer resource to attempt to join a domain. That might look like this:

    xComputer 'Hostname' {
        Name       = $node.NodeName;
        DomainName = ""
        Credential = New-Object -TypeName PSCredential -ArgumentList @(
            "fakePassword@123" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force

    With this configuration, the VM will wait until it can join a domain before presenting the logon screen. Assuming there is no domain on your local network that has a user named fake with a password of fakePassword@123, attempting to join that domain will fail, and the VM will hang indefinitely at the Hyper-V boot screen.

  4. Reset a VM that is hung at the Hyper-V boot screen and troubleshoot it

    • Deploy the example configuration you just created
    • Wait for the VM to hang
    • Reset the VM
    • Log in
    • Find the logs that detail the hang
  5. Use Powershell Remoting to connect to a machine that is hung at the Hyper-V boot screen

    • Redeploy the example configuration you just created (deleting the old deployment if it still exists)
    • Wait for the VM to hang
    • Log in using Powershell Remoting
    • Find the logs that detail the hang


[CmdletBinding()] Param(
    [Array] $ErrorList = $global:Error,
    [Int] $ExitCode = $global:LASTEXITCODE,
    [switch] $ExitIfErrors,
    [Int] $WrapWidth

function WrapText {
    param($text, $width, $indentSpaces)
    $width = $width -1
    $indent = " " * $indentSpaces
    foreach ($line in ($text -split "`n")) {
        while ($line.length -gt $width) {
            $line = "$indent$line"
            Write-Output -InputObject $line.substring(0,$width)
            $line = $line.substring($width)
        Write-Output -InputObject "$indent$line"

if (-not $WrapWidth) {
    if ($Host.UI.RawUI.Buffersize.Width) {
        $WrapWidth = $Host.UI.RawUI.Buffersize.Width
    } else {
        $WrapWidth = 9999

if ($ErrorList.count -or $ExitCode) {
    Write-Output -InputObject "ERROR Report: `$LASTEXITCODE=$ExitCode, `$Error.count=$($Error.count)"
    for ($i=$ErrorList.count -1; $i -ge 0; $i-=1) {
        $err = $ErrorList[$i]
        Write-Output -InputObject "`$Error[$i]:"

        # $error can contain at least 2 kind of objects - ErrorRecord objects, and things that wrap ErrorRecord objects
        # The information we need is found in the ErrorRecord objects, so unwrap them here if necessary
        if ($err.PSObject.Properties['ErrorRecord']) {$err = $err.ErrorRecord}

        WrapText -text $err.ToString() -width $WrapWidth -indentSpaces 4

        if ($err.ScriptStackTrace) {
            WrapText -text $err.ScriptStackTrace -width $WrapWidth -indentSpaces 8
    if ($ExitIfErrors) {
        exit 1
else {
    Write-Output -InputObject "ERROR Report: No errors"