Jeff Sacksteder's questions

If I administrate an on-site WSUS instance, I am responsible for releasing updates to domain-joined PCs according to some policy guidelines. Is there some sort of metadata or technique I can use to assess the impact to end users before deciding when to release an update.

The specific scenario I am trying to address is the occurrence of apparently smaller updates that require restarts and take an absurd amount of time to complete. On several occasions I have seen PCs that attempt to 'shut down and apply updates' from the Start Menu at 5 PM and sit for over a half hour while they grind away at the hard drive. These are modern, fast machines with SSDs and 8Gb or more of ram. My only theory is that these updates must be scanning the whole disk for some reason. If these updates are flagged in some way, I would like to hold them back until a planned downtime day.

Are there any other options beyond applying them individually and timing them with a stopwatch?

Can I move a Storage Spaces virtual disk from one pool to another?

Or do I need to create new volumes and copy the files with the operating system?

I have some disks attached to a PERC H800. Since it unfortunately does not have a proper passthrough/JBOD mode, each physical disk is mapped to a 1-disk RAID 0 virtual disk. My question is- can those disks can be moved to being directly connected to a SAS controller without destroying the data on the disk?

There a a few questions related to using DFSR and Shadow Copies together, but none that indicates if Shadow Copies replicate or not. Meaning, if I have a a pair of DFS replicas with Shadow Copies on Server-A, can I revert that file to a previous version on Server-B? If so, will that reversion be replicated back to Server-A?

I suspect not- that VSS is a local NTFS feature and outside the scope of replication, but I cannot verify that myself at the moment.

Consider a configuration with two identical WS2012R2 servers. Both have quad-port network boards. Each has one NIC connected to a subnet shared by other servers and ultimately accessible to client machines. The remaining three ports on each server are 'nic teamed' and connected to a different subnet shared only by the two servers in question. What I would like to see is SMB traffic preferentially going over the faster 3-nic path and only resorting to the more congested 1-nic path if necessary.

Can I trust the load-balancing in SMB3 to do the right thing here? If not, can I apply some sort of weighting similar to tcp/ip route costing?

I have a Dell NX3000- which is a Windows Server 2008 based unit. It has an additional cabinet full of drives attached, as well. I have spare licenses for Windows Server 2012 Standard that could be applied to this unit to turn it into a smb 3.0 server. Obviously, this is not a supported configuration from Dell but are there any known issues on this hardware series that would prevent this?

I have two disks from an old server that I believe were a mirrored set. I placed them in a new server and tried to do a zpool import but nothing was found. Does that mean the data that was on them previously is lost or is there some way to reconstitute the pool?

With the described configuration, I have a SQL Agent Job that includes a Powershell step. That step throws an error when it gets to the line

$app = start-process -passthru $program $program_args

saying -

"The error information returned by PowerShell is: 'The term 'start-process' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. '. Process Exit Code -1. The step failed."

The lines preceding this seem to work ok. I suspect that the Powershell host that is running the script is crippled regarding that function but I am not able to verify this anywhere.

I have Sharepoint 2010 set up on a virtual host for prototyping various projects. If I restart the host, the IP changes. Afterwards, SP complains that it can't find it's configuration database. I can't find where it might be storing an IP. To clarify, the URL remains the same - I have a dynamic dns solution in place to handle that. I can't see anything in the web.config files or the database connection strings that would indicate a hardcoded IP.

How can I fix this up in less time than re-installing every time I need to do a project?

I moved a repository from an old server to a new copy of Subversion Edge. I had existing authentication and authorization files that were brought over, but was unable to determine how to integrate those into the Edge product. I modified the httpd conf file by hand to use those existing user files, but this means that I can't manage users in the web interface. There are some references to hsql and I can't figure out where the superadmin credential is stored, but it works currently. Can I get some guidance on how to manage user databases?

I have a Sharepoint 2007(wss 3) instance that is growing about 600 Mb a day. Is there a report or tool that will show me where this space is being used?

I've deployed BES against Exchange 2003, but know very little about it. I now have a problem that is testing the limits of my knowledge.

One user recently stopped getting messages on the phone. They appear in the mailbox and seem to be ok in Outlook. The user can send mail correctly. SMS works. I can send PIN messages to the phone from the BES console. The emails never synchronize. I've restarted the server just to verify it's not gone insane. The user actually was expecting a new phone, so we activated it when it came in just in case the phone itself was malfunctioning. No Luck.

The log files are basically undecipherable. I don't see anything obviously wrong, though.

How do you go about troubleshooting something like this?