Colin Pickard's questions

We're using the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012.

We have some virtual machines which are powered off. How can I find out when they were last run?

We have Postini set up with their extended message discovery service. This requires having our exchange server set up to journal messages to their mail servers. Everything has been set up and working for months. Now, a couple of times an hour a message that we sent them is rejected as being spam. This is fine, since it usually is spam which has somehow got through the filter on it's way in, and we don't want spam in the archive anyway BUT Exchange keeps this message in queue and keeps trying to resend it:

After 24 hours, there are hundreds of messages in the queue, and Exchange is accessing the disk constantly. This is a double problem since our Exchange is in a VM, and it is causing performance issues for other VMs. If you manually clear down the queue it's fine again, until the queue refills.

How can I get Exchange to bin the messages it cannot send to Postini?

I'm using Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. I have one virtual machine that writes constantly to its vhd, using between 60% and 100% of the maximum disk I/O according to Resource Monitor. This makes other VMs on that server very slow.

This VM is doing useful work so I don't want to shut it down. Is there any way in Hyper-V limit the amount of disk I/O? Or reduce the priority of that VM?

We have a pfSense firewall in our datacentre. By default, pfSense is only storing 500K of firewall filter logs, which is only a few hours for us. How can I increase this?

pfSense uses clog rather than the usual BSD newsyslog.

I only want the log for debugging firewall rules, not compliance or anything, and the firewall has 100GB of spare disk space, so I'd rather have the logs on the firewall itself than set up a syslog server.

I'm backing up a Windows Server 2008 R2 server to external USB disks using Windows Server backup. I want the person who physically removes the drive to rotate it offsite to be able to eject the drive before unplugging it. How should I set up my permissions for this? I tried adding them to the "Backup Operators" group but it just prompts them for an admin password when they try to eject it.

Thanks

I've been landed with the job of documenting how to install a very complicated application onto a clean server. Part of the application requires a lot of perl scripts, each of which seem to require lots of different perl modules.

I don't know much about perl, and I only know one way to install the required modules. This means my documentation now looks this:

Type each of these commands and accept all the defaults:

sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install JSON'
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Date::Simple'
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Log::Log4perl'
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Email::Simple'
(.... continues for 2 more pages... )

Is there any way I can do all this one line like I can with aptitude i.e.

Type the following command and go get a coffee:

sudo aptitude install openssh-server libapache2-mod-perl2 build-essential ...

Thank you (on behalf of the long suffering people who will be reading my document)

EDIT: The best way to do this is to use the packaged versions. For the modules which were not packaged for Ubuntu 10.10 I ended up with a little perl script which I found here )

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use CPANPLUS;
    use strict;
    CPANPLUS::Backend->new( conf => { prereqs => 1 } )->install(
        modules => [ qw(
            Date::Simple
            File::Slurp
            LWP::Simple
            MIME::Base64
            MIME::Parser
            MIME::QuotedPrint
        ) ]
    );

This means I can put a nice one liner in my document:

sudo perl installmodules.pl

Does anyone know if there is a decent flat-rate backup service which supports Windows Server?

I've investigated the following:

• Backblaze - no WS support, sales say they have a "no server" policy
• JungleDisk - not flat rate
• Mozy - no WS on regular edition, no flat-rate on Pro edition
• Dropbox - no flat rate
• Carbonite - technically flat rate, but throttles uploads to modem speeds

EDIT: Very similar question:

Is there a decent flat-rate online backup solution for Linux machines?

Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my software licensing question?

Is there any legal reason why you can't use the Home versions of Windows 7 or Vista in a business environment?

The technical differences and limitations are well documented online but I can't find anything that says there is a legal restriction like there is for the Home editions of Microsoft Office.

I have a Windows Server 2008 (not R2) machine which has problems with redirected printing.

Clients connecting via Remote Desktop have their printers redirected and appearing for them to print to, but printing from applications on the server to local printers is giving blank pages, missing pages, or pages with headers/footers but no middle section. The issues are consistant for similar prints, but sometimes other prints and/or applications will work correctly.

I have installed PDFCreator locally on the server, and the same print jobs sent by the same application appear correctly in the PDFs. Printing that PDF via the redirected printer prints correctly.

I have tried the following:

1. Installing drivers. I’ve installed several drivers different drivers, for both the client and server operating system and architecture, on the client and the server.
2. Reinstalling the printers. I’ve tried reinstalling on remote print servers, the clients, and the host server, and tried different client machines.
3. Granting everyone full permissions on the print spool folder on the server.
4. Editing the registry to forward non-USB ports (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302361)

None of these have made any difference.

The clients are using Windows 7 or Windows XP and none of them have any issues with printing locally.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

I have a Windows XP machine that I'm accessing remotely which has tendancy to get into a weird state with the network connection - when you're on the machine locally it shows as connected still but nothing gets through. Disabling and Enabling the network connection solves the problem. I guess this symptomatic of a more serious problem, but I can't get to the machine to sort it out until at least Monday, so I was hoping to either find some utility or put to together a quick script to test the network connection (i.e. telnet google.com 80 or something) and restart the network connection if possible or else reboot the machine. Googling on this suggests only really complicated lash-ups, and I don't want to lock myself out before I can get to it... Can anyone suggest something simple? Or even a way to automatically restart the connection every couple of hours?

I've written a simple batch script that watches some services and regularly restarts them. I've used the eventcreate command to write to the Windows event log, which seems like a good way of logging my actions, but I notice that the 'category' field is always empty. Can I use this field to put some extra information in? There doesn't seem to be a parameter on eventcreate for it. Or is this reserved for some internal Windows data?

I have a computer which was unexpectedly shut down during a distribution upgrade (Ubuntu 8.10 -> 9.04). It now won't finish booting - various X errors, then it goes to the login screen but won't allow logins.

I have a backup of it and the /home data is all still OK on the drive so it's no emergancy, but a complete rebuild is still an annoying and time consuming process. Is there any way to recover from this? I have a 9.04 CD, I was debating trying installing over the top - is that a good idea?

Failing that, is there any good way of inspecting the drive and generating a list of software installed, and preferably even the setttings from outside /home (like /etc)?

If I've got to start again from scratch, any recommendations for dealing with the person responsible for the unexpected shutdown? :)

EDIT: Thank you very much for all the answers, I really need to accept all the answers as I needed to use bits from each. I was able to fully repair the install using something like this:

sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get update
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo dpkg --configure -a --abort-after=99999
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade