Boden's questions

I have a 10 year old APC Smart-UPS XL with battery pack, and need new batteries. Looks like I'll be spending $500-700 in batteries.

While shopping around, I noticed a few places selling refurbished UPSes with brand new batteries for pretty good prices. In fact, I could get a more current model with more features for about the same price as replacing the batteries in my existing UPS.

I'm a little bit nervous about buying a refurbished UPS, because I'm not really sure what any particular company means by "refurbished". Who refurbished it? Can I trust that it'll provide factory-spec power protection? Etc. I understand that I won't get a factory warranty or "insurance".

Does anyone have any experience or advice in this matter?

Over the years various versions of .NET have been deployed to my client machines via WSUS. Now it seems that on many machines these installations have hosed eachother, and certain .NET security updates are failing.

I verified that I can run the .NET cleanup tool to get rid of all the .NET installations on a client, and I can then push out .NET 3.5 via WSUS. This seems to have solved the problems I'm having on the machine I tried it on.

So the question is: if I've got .NET 3.5, is there any reason to also have previous versions installed?

I need to trigger a particular GPO-deployed application to reinstall. In the past I've just deleted a certain registry key that tells Windows: "this application has been installed".

But I can't for the life of me remember where those keys are located in the registry, and searching isn't turning much up.

Thanks!

1. If you can't afford or don't need a cluster or spare server waiting to come online in the event of a failure, it seems like you might split the services provided by one beefy server onto two less beefy servers. Thus if Server A goes down, clients might lose access to, say email, and if Server B goes down, they might lose access to the ERP system.

   While at first this seems like it would be more reliable, doesn't it simply increase the chance of hardware failure? So any one failure isn't going to have as great an impact on productivity, but now you're setting yourself up for twice as many failures.

   When I say "less beefy", what I really mean is lower component spec, not lower quality. So one machine specification out for visualization vs two servers spec'd out for less load each.

2. Often times a SAN is recommended so that you can either use clustering or migration to keep services up. But what about the SAN itself? If I was to put money on where a failure is going to occur, it's not going to be on the basic server hardware, it's going to have something to do with storage. If you don't have some sort of redundant SAN, then those redundant servers wouldn't give me a great feeling of confidence. Personally for a small operation it would make more sense to me to invest in servers with redundant components and local drives. I can see a benefit in larger operations where the price and flexibility of a SAN is cost effective. But for smaller shops I'm not seeing the argument, at least not for fault tolerance.

So when I buy a server from HP, it typically pays to start with a pre-configured Smart-Buy and then add all the junk I want in it to the order. So what should I do with all of the stuff that came pre-configured but has been replaced by upgraded components? (for instance I'll have 460W power supply, a couple sticks of RDIMMs, a DVDRW, and maybe some other stuff)

Does this stuff go into your mountain of spare parts that'll never be used? Do you bother trying to eBay it for the company? Is there a top secret IT parts swap program? :)

Hyper-V R2. I know best practices say to give Hyper-V and all its guests separate spindles, but that gets costly pretty quickly.

What are your thoughts on running Hyper-V plus one domain controller and one member server on a single 2 disk RAID1 with 10K SAS drives? No application-level data will be on the array. The server will have an abundance of memory for this task.

I've got to pull six or so lines through the rafters of this building. There's a mess of wire up there, and I'd like to keep these lines separated a bit.

Are there any cable guides that could be quickly nailed or fastened to roof trusses for this sort of thing? Preferably something that cable can slide through during installation.

Yes, this is on of those "do my job for me" questions, have some pity:)

I'm at the limit for what I can do with the number of hard drives in a server without spending a substantial amount of money. I have four drives left to configure, and I can either set them up as a RAID 5 and dedicate a hot spare, or a RAID 10 with no hot spare. The size of each will be the same, and the RAID 5 will offer enough performance.

I'm RAID 5 shy, but I also don't like the idea of running without a hot spare. I'm not so interested in degraded performance, but the amount of time the system is without adequate redundancy. The server and drives are under a 13x5 4 hour response contract (although I happen to know that the nearest service provider is at least 2-3 hours away by car in the winter).

I should note that the server also has two RAID 1 arrays which would also be protected by the hot spare. Why don't they make drive cages with 9 bays! Heh.

I'm trying to put together a drive configuration. I've got a server with 2 x 146GB SAS drives, and am adding several 300 GB drives.

Due to limitations on the number of drives I can put in this thing, I'd like to use only one bay for a global hot spare. I'm assuming that I can use a 300GB drive for this purpose, and it'll be able to protect all of the arrays whether they're built with 300 or 146 GB drives.

If I use a single 300GB hot spare, and a 146GB drive fails...I'm going to get a 146GB replacement from the manufacturer which isn't going to work as a global spare, so the 146GB array will have to be rebuilt a second time onto the replacement 146GB drive so that the 300GB drive can be returned to its duty as a global spare.

It would also be possible to run two hot spares, one 146 and one 300, but that would put a bit of a wrinkle in my plans because I'm at the limit on the number of drives I can put in this server.

I could also just keep a 146GB cold spare and have the 300GB hot spare only protect the arrays built with 300GB drives. The chances of failure while I'm out of town are small, and perhaps I could walk someone through the swap over the phone (yikes).

From those who have more experience trying to budget resources for hot spares, can you provide me with any insight to help me choose the correct path?

I've got a 2200VA UPS with AVR and power conditioning that's over 10 years old.

Does a UPS lose its ability to protect equipment over time? I'm not asking about batteries, but the UPS hardware itself.

My question is: when is it appropriate to simply create one large array with fast read & write performance, such as RAID 10, instead of creating smaller arrays for specific applications?

It seems to me that if my overall I/O requirements are not terribly heavy, a single array with excellent read and write performance could provide better performance overall to all applications except at those (perhaps rare) times when applications with different access patterns peaked at the same time (copying large amounts of large files while a database is getting slammed).

If I dedicate a pair spindles to a particular task, such as transaction logs, and they're not even breaking a sweat with the workload...why not just put that workload onto a larger RAID 10? Those spindles would then be able to contribute to other workloads instead of sitting around scratching themselves 60% of the time.

PS, in my particular case the cost overhead of RAID 10 isn't a factor, because I'm looking at creating multiple RAID 1 arrays and one smallish RAID 5. Going RAID 10 for the amount of space I need would be comparable.

I'm looking to create an account similar to a Domain Admin, but without access to domain controllers. In other words, this account will have full Administrator rights to any client machine in the domain, be able to add machines to the domain, but have only limited user rights to the servers.

This account will be used by a person in an end-user tech support kind of role. They should have full access to client machines for installing drivers, applications, etc... but I don't want them on the servers.

While I could probably throw something together myself via policy, it'll probably be messy so I figured I should ask: What's the proper way to go about this?

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

It's pretty common to hear people recommend using a "test server" for testing everything from backup/restore to software patches.

Some Microsoft server products are fairly expensive. Are people really buying additional licenses for testing purposes? I can see buying extra hardware, but the cost of duplicate software could get pretty outrageous.

I've looked in to MSDN and Technet but licenses obtained via these subscriptions don't seem to be appropriate for "IT" testing, only development testing and evaluation. I suppose one could always use trial products, but what a hassle...and perhaps that's even a violation of the trial agreement.

So I'm not trying to start an ethical debate or anything. I'm wondering what the most cost effective approach would be. Is there an alternative to buying full retail licenses? (Specifically, products like Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server, and Sharepoint.)

Here's some easy points for someone:

If I issue a command like copy * /destination in a folder containing a file that is being written to, will the partially written file be copied? Will it be ignored? Will copy throw an error?

Basically I have a script that copies files from a folder to a new location on a schedule, and there could be a case in which a new file is being written to the source folder when the script runs. I'm wondering what precautions I might need to take.

Edit: I should mention that the file will be coming in via SMB to a shared folder.

After rolling out a new software package, I'm seeing high CPU usage on machines. One process that seems to be really active is msiexec, which really shouldn't be running. I'm watching it in process explorer and every now and then I can see it launching new processes that I can tell are related to the new software...but the processes end rather quickly.

Is there any way to get some specifics on what the Windows Installer is currently up to?

Question is in the title. Has something to do with Sharepoint, but a little bit of searching on my part didn't turn up a good answer.

I've got an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. There are several packages which are "kept back" ("the following updates have been kept back") when I do an apt-get upgrade. It's my understanding that I can do an apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade these packages, but I have a few concerns:

1. If I do a dist-upgrade, will I be upgrading from 8.04 to higher version (8.10 I guess)? If so, what's the point of 8.04 being "Long Term Support" (LTS)?

2. Is this a "dangerous" process? I'm assuming that packages are kept back because there are new packages that they depend on. Does dist-upgrade simply pull the new packages and do a fairly straightforward upgrade, or are there caveats to look into?

I had a workstation running XP. Filesystem was NTFS, single partition over the entire drive. After an attempted XP repair install, suddenly the NTFS filesystem is just gone and the drive is showing up with a single 10Mb FAT32 partition with virtually nothing on it, except a directory with a smiley-face character (e.g. not good).

I've run all the tools I could find on the UBCD and nothing is able to detect the missing NTFS partition. I've run some low-level tools on the drive and it checks out ok. I'm not ruling out hardware, but that's not really my question.

What are my options here for recovery?

Update: I was never able to recover the partition, but I did recover a lot of data using PhotoRec (from the same guys who do TestDisk, recommended in the answers below). The name is misleading as it doesn't only recover "photos", as I had originally thought. It does some 180 file formats.

Windows Server 2003.

Is there any way to easily rotate event logs (or automatically clear and save)? I'm doing a bit of auditing on this machine and my security log gets real big real quick and every couple of weeks I have to remember to save and clear it out.

Yeah I could rely on backup jobs and enable overwriting...but it would be nicer if I could just get Windows to automatically save and clear the log when it's nearing capacity.

Is anyone successfully using Firefox 3 in a Windows domain? By "successfully" I mean deploying via AD, configuring via GPO (especially setting network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris), default plugins, and somehow managing updates.

I'm aware of FrontMotion and Firefox ADM. It looks like the FrontMotion MSI installer and administration templates would solve most of the problem. I'm not sure how updates would work, however... without me having to update the MSI manually.

I'm also a little bit leery of using a 3rd party package for this. I'm not terribly worried that FrontMotion is packaging up anything naughty in their distribution, but I don't like having to rely on them for being timely with critical updates and such.

Have any of you successfully replaced IE with Firefox in your organization? Is the way your managing it on par with managing IE on your desktops?