mrdenny's questions

I'm trying to push out Azure Recovery Services to users desktops without having to manually go to all the users desktops to configure the Azure Recovery Agent and the Vault Credentials. All the automation options that I'm finding assume that you have DPM in place (which we don't, and it isn't required for file/folder backups which is all we care about for this project).

Has anyone seen a way to configure Azure Recovery Services on a users desktop/laptop via powershell, command line switches, witch craft without needing a DPM server?

I know this is a stupid question, but I've found nothing online. Does anyone know where EMC has hidden the support matrix documentation so that I know what version of PowerPath is supported with which version of FLARE?

I've got a client who wants to move his companies servers off site. As he is only a 10 person company I'm looking for some pretty in-expensive options. One option is the smallest of the Amazon cloud machines. The question becomes can I make one of these machines a domain controller?

Cost wise the Amazon machine is cheaper than the power costs of keeping a server (or a PC) up and running in his home office 24x7 thanks to the high cost of power in Southern California.

I've got a server running BES 5 that I'd like to rename. Does anyone have any docs on how to do this? I haven't found anything on RIMs site or when searching.

UPDATE: In my case the SQL databases are on another server which is a dedicated SQL Server.

All, I've got a Windows XP client which is unable to query DNS for local or internet looks. Even using ping fails to work. However if I run nslookup from the command line it works fine. But nothing else does.

I've also noticed that when I run msinfo32 I get WMI errors. If I try an reinstall WMI using the below, it prompts me for the Windows XP SP3 disk. I've downloaded SP 3 and expanded it, but when I point it to that folder there are still files that it can't find.

rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection WBEM 132 %windir%\inf\wbemoc.inf

I'm in the process of reinstalling SP3 on the machine now to see if that fixes it. The only errors that I see in the Application and System log are about how it can't locate the domain controllers.

TCP connectivity to the machine is working OK as I can remote desktop to the machine without issue (I'm assuming my credentials are cached). Windows Firewall is disabled as is the firewall within Trend Micro. I've tried disabling Trend Micro to see if that helps which it didn't.

If reinstalling SP3 doesn't help any all I can think of is to have the user format the machine and reinstall.

I'm open to all ideas here, crazy or not.

We've got our Exchange 2007 environment setup and working correctly. There is one strange thing however. When I log onto a mailbox server it tells me that one of the edge transports is in trial mode. However when I log onto that edge transport server it says that it is correctly licensed.

Which server is correct, and how can I fix the error?

We've got a pretty large MSMQ environment setup which today decided to grind to a halt.

(Everything is a VM under vSphere 4.0 Update 1)

There are 8 Web Servers which receive data from clients on the net. These machines all have MSMQ installed and simply send the MSMQ message to the main MSMQ server. Messages are currently piled up in the outbound queue. These machines are Windows 2008 Web Edition with 2 Gigs of RAM and 2 vCPUs.

We have a Clustered MSMQ server (Windows Cluster Server) which gets the messages from the 8 web servers. There is no limit on the amount of data that can be in the queues. The hard drive is 50 Gigs, and there is 46 Gigs of free space. These machines are Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition with 8 Gigs of RAM and 4 vCPUs. The cluster used to have 2 vCPUs but the CPU load was hitting 100%, so I increased both nodes of the Windows cluster to 4 vCPUs.

There are 4 app servers which read the messages from the queues and process them.

Normally this all works perfectly, but not today.

This morning everything is running very slowly. The 8 web servers are currently showing up to 300k messages sitting in the outbound queues. The clustered server currently shows over a million messages in the queues (some are as low as 200k).

If I look at perfmon at the 8 web servers it shows that I'm averaging 2 messages sent per second. If I look at perfmon on the cluster it shows ~7 messages per second are coming into the cluster.

The machines which are doing the reading aren't getting many messages each. The fastest services are getting 10-12 messages per second, the slowest are showing 0 or 1.

The only changes recently is that we changed the number of front end web servers from 4 to 8. We did this about 2 weeks ago without issue. On Tuesday we powered them down to see how the remaining 4 could handle the load. On Wednesday we turned the four newer machines back on.

The disk on the cluster shows very low IO and no queueing.

To be safe I've updated PowerPath to the newest version but that hasn't helped any.

The 8 web servers are on one vLAN, and the Cluster'd servers and the app servers are on a second vLAN. There are no firewalls between the vLANs.

And there is nothing useful in the application or system logs on any of the machines.

All our servers are setup under a volume license agreement so they shouldn't prompt for activation. However some of them constantly ask for reactivation. These are all VMs running under VMware vSphere.

The machine that prompted for activation today said that the hardware had changed since it was activated, when I know for a fact that it hasn't. It isn't all the machines that require reactivation, just some of them.

The machines are Windows 2008 with either the Web Edition or the Standard Edition.

When I look in the event log the entry after the one saying that the hardware has changed says.

The RAC or SPC license in invalid {guid} hr=0xC004E003 (4,0xC004F00F)

The next one says

License acquisition failure details. hr=0xC004C008

The next one says

Acuisition of End User License failed. hr=0xC004C008 Sku Id={guid}

Where I put {guid} is has an actual GUID.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on?

I've got two VMs running BusyBox (under ESX). These machines function only as load balancers.

I'm using pen to do the load balancing on each machine which is working fine. But when I fire up vrrpd ping works, but nothing else does.

Each load balancer has 3 interfaces. The Management IPs are on eth0, eth1 is for a second load balancer setup.

LBCO102A
10.3.16.96 - (eth0) Management IP
10.3.16.84 - (eth2) IP that pen uses

LBCO102B
10.3.16.94 - (eth0) Management IP
10.3.16.85 - (eth2) IP that pen uses

vrrpd uses 10.3.16.58

On LBCO102A I'm using the following to start vrrpd:

vrrpd -i eth2 -v 58 -p 100 10.3.16.58

On LBCO102B I'm using the following to start vrrpd:

vrrpd -i eth2 -v 58 -p 50 10.3.16.58

I can connect to the IPs 10.3.16.84 and 10.3.16.85 without issue on port 80. I can connect to the management IPs 10.3.16.94 and 10.3.16.96 without issue. When I connect to 10.3.16.58 it times out. Nothing is displayed in the /var/run/messages file except that one is master and the other not.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why vrrpd isn't pushing traffic other than ping? I've got three of these setups. One on pop3, one on smtp and one on http. None of them work for anything but ping.

Here's the netstat -an from LBCO102A

Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:9999            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.84:80           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8888            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8889            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:53960        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.96:22           10.3.30.154:1224        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:54000        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:54102        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:54038        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:53959        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:54001        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:54101        TIME_WAIT
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.96:22           10.3.30.154:1097        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.107:110         10.3.17.30:54037        TIME_WAIT
raw        0      0 0.0.0.0:112             0.0.0.0:*               0
Active UNIX domain sockets (servers and established)
Proto RefCnt Flags       Type       State         I-Node Path
unix  7      [ ]         DGRAM                    983    /tmp/log
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    1156708
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    1156657
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    1156524
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    192729
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    994

Here's the netstat -an from LBCO102B

Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:9999            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.85:80           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8888            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 10.3.16.94:22           10.3.30.154:1118        ESTABLISHED
raw        0      0 0.0.0.0:112             0.0.0.0:*               0
Active UNIX domain sockets (servers and established)
Proto RefCnt Flags       Type       State         I-Node Path
unix  6      [ ]         DGRAM                    981    /tmp/log
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    188253
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    179316
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    179306
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    988

Here's what I've got in my startup scripts. (there's more in the scripts to check for start/stop/restart) LBCO103A

echo -n "Starting eth2: "
ifconfig eth2 10.3.16.84 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
echo "OK"

echo -n "Starting vrrp-ascossrs101: "
vrrpd -i eth2 -v 58 -p 100 10.3.16.58
echo "OK"

echo -n "Starting pen-ascossrs101: "
/bin/pen -C 8888 -X -l /var/log/ascossrs101.log -p /var/log/ascossrs101.pid 10.3.16.84:80 10.3.16.56:80 10.3.16.57:80
echo "OK"

LBCO102B

echo -n "Starting eth2: "
ifconfig eth2 10.3.16.85 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
echo "OK"

echo -n "Starting vrrp-ascossrs101: "
vrrpd -i eth2 -v 58 -p 100 10.3.16.58
echo "OK"

echo -n "Starting pen-ascossrs101: "
/bin/pen -C 8888 -X -l /var/log/ascossrs101.log -p /var/log/ascossrs101.pid 10.3.16.85:80 10.3.16.56:80 10.3.16.57:80
echo "OK"

I'm looking for a free or open source way to send emails to new employees when there account is created. I'm ok if its a powershell script, or something else which runs once per day. I'd like to be able to give is a couple of email files exported from outlook as there's a couple of emails I need all the new employees to get.

I understand the basics of spanning tree, but that's about it. I'm hoping that someone can tell me if this will work as I want it to.

I've got two Cisco ACE load balancers setup for redundancy. Each ACE is connected to its own layer 2 switch. Currently each layer 2 switch is connected to its own 1 Gig fibre link to the CoLo. Each fibre link is setup for a different IP Subnet and our CoLo doesn't offer handling the BGP for us. We have to purchase our own routers to handle that, which is a project which is coming up.

(I've got the layer 2 switches in there because the CoLo provides fibre and the ACEs only have copper so all the switches are doing is changing the fibre to copper for me.)

So currently I can only use a single load ballancer because the ACEs don't support spanning tree. Now the layer 2 switches to support spanning tree, it is just disabled by default. Now if I were to enable spanning tree, and cross connect the layer 2 switches would everything work as expected, or would this cause the network to come crashing down?

I'm hoping to get some expert advise before I try this as it is a production network and I don't have a couple of extra Cisco ACE load ballancers to try it with in a lab.

UPDATE: based on the comments I need to include a diagram. Here's what we currently have.

The problem is that the second ISP link isn't usable to us at the moment because of the lack of BGP. So I want to cross connect the two network switches together. I've been told that if I connect the two ACEs together that'll complete the circle and cause network problems. So if I can connect the switches at the top which support spanning tree that should take care of the problem. Eventually there will be two routers between the top switches and the load ballancers to handle the BGP over the two network links.

Am I making sense? Sorry this is such a mess, I'm much more at home in SQL Server then Networking.

My company will shortly be setting up a blog, and I'm planning on setting up two web servers to host the wordpress website for redundancy. Normally when we do releases to a site in a farm we push to one side, test and then release to the other side. For wordpress updates we can do this easily enough. However the problem becomes how to handle the wp-content folder. As people will be publishing posts, and uploading graphics these will need to be synced to the other server in the farm no matter what server to user uploads them to.

I could setup DFS to replicate the files, but that seams like overkill.

I could setup robocopy to run every 15 minutes or something, then tell everyone that posts to be sure to schedule the post to be published in at least 15 minutes so that the files have time to replicate.

Are there any better solutions out there? Perhaps something a wordpress plugin so that when graphics are uploaded to the post they are automatically replicated to the other servers in the farm?

I'm running Wordpress on Windows 2008 so Linux solutions won't help much.

Does anyone know what the maximum size on an indexing service index is on Windows 2008? We are having all sorts of problems with the index hanging and not processing new documents.

I just deleted the catalog and and recreated it. I've added in 4 of the folders that should be indexes, but have 8 more to add. The index has gone up to ~3 Gigs for the 4 folders that are being indexed.

So far the Indexing service has stayed up and running for several days now. (Knock on wood.) I'm now thinking that the Indexing service doesn't like it when the network share that it is looking at fails over. The file server is an active passive cluster and all network shares are a cluster resource within there own cluster group (cluster application using Windows 2008 terms). The Index service is also a clustered resource within it's own application so that it can fail over independently of the file shares.

From what I can tell the indexing service only seams to really have a panic attack when one of the nodes fails over (granted this happens every time that Microsoft releases a patch as the nodes reboot).

I'm considering putting a script in each clustered application which forces the indexing service to go offline then come back online when any of the monitored network shares fail over. If I go this route I'll have to be careful that when multiple network shares failover at once they don't start failing if the index service is already in the process of failing over.

We are having a very strange problem, that I'm hoping someone has seen before.

Our site is made up of html files with ASP code inside them. We have IIS setup to run the html files through the asp engine with no problem.

The problem we are having is that some users when they browse the site, the server takes forever to do the initial response. Up to about 25-35 seconds. If we telnet to the public IP on port 80 from a machine with the problem and to "GET /" it takes quite a while to respond. Now the catch here is that if I telnet from the same machine to the web server's private IP behind the load balancer I can browse the site just fine.

The load balancers are Cisco ACE's and have been working fine for a couple of months now.

To make it stranger, the other two web clusters are not having the problem.

To test I created a test.html which just has a couple of lines in it, and that can be pulled just fine via Telnet, or web browser.

We've reduced the cluster down to a single machine for troubleshooting with no success. The production machines are Windows 2008 Web Edition. I've even setup a Windows 2003 Standard server and moved the site to that machine without helping the problem.

To make things even move confusing not all client machines behind the same VIP have the problem. In the case of our office all network requests go through a single public IP, but about 30% of the office machines are having this problem, while the rest can browse the site just fine.

Other sites on this cluster are having the problem as well, but we are looking at just the one to try and figure out the problem.

I've checked the disk queues on the web servers and can't see a problem.

I have Exchange SCR all setup and working. Until my cluster failed over to the backup node. Now the replication won't run and when I try and query for the replication status using either the UI or the CLI I get the following.

Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus : Microsoft Exchange Replication service RPC failed
: Microsoft.Exchange.Rpc.RpcException: Error e0434f4d from cli_GetCopyStatusEx
   at Microsoft.Exchange.Rpc.Cluster.ReplayRpcClient.GetCopyStatusEx(Guid[] sgG
uids, RpcStorageGroupCopyStatus[]& sgStatuses)
   at Microsoft.Exchange.Cluster.Replay.ReplayRpcClientWrapper.InternalGetCopyS
tatus(String serverName, Guid[] sgGuids, RpcStorageGroupCopyStatus[]& sgStatuse
s, Int32 serverVersion)
At line:1 char:26
+ get-storagegroupcopystatus <<<<

Now if I add in the -StandByMachine switch it returns a recordset. I can reseed the replication to the node which was active, but the replication doesn't ever do anything besides that and I can't query for the status.

So far I've done the following.

1. Changed the rights on the guid network shares on both nodes of the cluster by adding in Exchange Servers with Full Control.
2. Changed the rights on the folders which are the base of those network shares giving the Exchange Servers full control.
3. Checked that the RPC Services are up and running on both nodes
4. Checked that the remote registry services are up and running on both nodes.
5. Checked the Exchange Servers domain group contains all Exchange Servers

I've looked in the event logs for the two servers which make up the cluster. I'm seeing errors about the network shares which let me to change the rights. About every 15 minutes in the logs for the machine that is currently passive I'm seeing 5 errors.

The directory '\ascoex101b\be321a6a-7b2b-427a-9130-9f0ac04438b2$' required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service for ASCOEX101V1\Mailbox Group 1 could not be accessed. Check the network connectivity and name resolution. Error: 53. The directory \ascoex101b\be321a6a-7b2b-427a-9130-9f0ac04438b2$ required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service for ASCOEX101V1\Mailbox Group 1 does not exist. Check the file system and its permissions. There was a problem with 'ascoex101b', which is an alternate name for 'ASCOEX101B'. The list of aliases is now 'ascoex101b', and the alias 'was' removed from the list. The specific problem is ''. The directory '\ascoex101b\2e491d6f-3691-49e7-b1b8-3e563b495c6b$' required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service for ASCOEX101V1\Public Folder Group could not be accessed. Check the network connectivity and name resolution. Error: 53. The directory \ascoex101b\2e491d6f-3691-49e7-b1b8-3e563b495c6b$ required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service for ASCOEX101V1\Public Folder Group does not exist. Check the file system and its permissions.

On the server that is active I'm seeing this error at about the same time.

Error updating public folder with free/busy information on virtual machine ASCOEX101V1. The error number is 0x8004010f.

The machine which is currently active is ascoex101b, the machine which is currently passive is ascoex101a, and the virtual name is ascoex101v1.

I'm assuming that the problem is related to something with the network shares but according to the share rights and folder rights everything should be working correctly. Any idea what I should check next?

I've got a WSUS Server setup and when some servers try and get updates they fail with 80072EE2 "Windows Update encountered an unknown error." The Get help link that Microsoft has so generously provided opens the Windows Help and Support which checks the net for ""WindowsUpdate_80072EE2" "WindowsUpdate_dt000"" and comes back with 0 results. Removing the dt000 error does nothing for me.

Everything I've found on the net says it's a network or firewall problem. There's no problem accessing the WSUS server from the network (they are all VMs on the same physical servers). I can browse to the webserver on the WSUS machine and get back the default website.

Other servers at the colo patch them selves just fine.

Windows Firewall is disabled on the machines in question, as are the third party firewalls.

Any ideas what else to check? The machines with the problem are running Windows 2008, as is the WSUS server.