Scott Salyer's questions

I am brand new to BizTalk administration and trying to setup the certificate to use for AS2 communication, and running into some problems. The developer who built everything inside BizTalk did it under one account, domain\developer, but everything actually runs under domain\biztalk.

All processing works great (meaning BizTalk can talk to the various databases on the local SQL Server), but when I am logged in as domain\biztalk and go to configure the AS2 certificate it seems like things get tripped up. According to this link (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/core/configuring-certificates-for-as2), the certificate has to be in the Personal store of the user BizTalk runs under, so I've imported that. When I open up the Server Administration Console though, I expand BizTalk Server Administration, then expand BizTalk Group and receive this error:

According to a couple of different links pointing to MSDN forums, it was suggested to restart the WMI service and it started working, but that didn't do it for me.

Where it gets really strange is, since all development was done under domain\developer, I logged in as that account and expanding BizTalk Server Administration Console works - I can see all options (Applications, Parties and Platform Settings). When I go in to Parties and try to configure the certificate, I receive back a "No certificate available. No certificates meet the application criteria." error. I'm sure this is because I need to link the certificate to the domain\biztalk account, but since the SnapIn stuff doesn't load, I'm at a loss on how to proceed.

Thanks for any help in advance!

I have a small, clustered Hyper-V infrastructure and one of my clients has 7 VMs with me currently. Their IT person would like to get console access to the instances, so if something freezes (as an example) he can login to the host and reboot the box. Is it possible to give him access to do this, while also restricting which VMs he can see? That way he can't accidentally touch one he shouldn't.

I know I could write a web interface for this that allows for rebooting and such with WMI management, but I'm hoping there is an easier alternative.

Thanks!

I recently stood up a new Windows Server 2012 R2 instance with SQL Server 2016 Web Edition and am trying to setup automated backups to Azure, but not having any luck. I created the storage account on Azure first, then created the Shared Access Signature (SAS) and that's where I start to get lost. From here, I've tried:

• Creating local credential using this script:

  CREATE CREDENTIAL [BlobUrlWithContainerName]
  WITH IDENTITY = '[FriendlyName]', 
  SECRET = '[SAS Token]'`
  

  No errors were reported with the above script, however issuing a BACKUP DATABASE command to a URL results in a not supported command (full error is: Cannot open backup device 'https://[storagename].blob.core.windows.net/[containername]/AdventureWorks2016.bak'. Operating system error 50(The request is not supported.).

• I then tried going through SSMS on an individual database backup option, with right-clicking on a database, selecting Tasks ==> Back Up.., changing Back Up To to a URL and clicking Add. When I do that, I get prompted with this:

  

  No registered containers exist (nor can I find any details on how to register one), so I click New Container which gives me a Connect to a Microsoft Subscription dialog. I signed in with my Azure account, see two subscriptions (Free Trial, which is expired, and Pay As You Go, which is the correct one), select Pay As You Go, and then when I go to select my storage account, the dialog closes and I get a "Index was out of range" error, which implies it can't find any containers. Here are the relevant screenshots:

  

  

I'm at a loss for where to go from here. Any ideas?

I am exploring Azure for some hosting options for a client of mine, and one thing we're looking for is a distributed model, where we'll have VMs sitting on the east and west coast, and when someone visits the site(s), they will go to the servers closest to them. This is identical to the Azure CDN model, however we need to full control over the content served, whereas the CDN option is public only (e.g. we need public and private). The database powering everything will be SQL Azure, so we're also hoping this solution can be smart enough to go to the SQL instance closest to the VM(s) as well.

I can't really find much detail from the Azure side on how to go about this, though I'll be honest in saying I also don't know the proper terms to even search for. Any tips/suggestions? The load balancing option from Azure doesn't seem like it'd be quite right, as it appears to be round-robin based which isn't what we're after either.

I am trying to implement Policy-based QoS on a Windows Server 2012 VM (running on Hyper-V), but for some reason it's not kicking in. The way I added the policy was by going into the Local Group Policy Editor ==> Windows Settings ==> Policy-based QoS and added a new policy for a specific exe (didn't use the path, just the exe name), DSCP Value is 0 and a Throttle Rate of 40960 as a start.

When I ran the exe in question, it quickly started hitting outbound rates of 100mb/s and higher, which it shouldn't be doing. I tried doing a gpupdate /force to the server, but that didn't change anything either. Finally, I changed the QoS policy to be any application, TCP/UDP and the throttle rate of 40960, but that still didn't do any throttling for me - it's still running at north of 100mb/s which correlates to a rather large colocation bill.

Any ideas on how I can rate limit this exe? I can't use our router for this, as I don't know the destination IPs for this outbound traffic - it just uses DNS to Azure, and if they changed an IP, I'd be out of luck.

Edit: I found a SF post (here: How can I limit a users bandwidth in Windows Server 2008 R2) that mentioned a utility called NetLimiter 4 and gave it a shot, but it also didn't seem to limit either as my bandwidth was still spiking at well over 90mb/s.

I have a few servers running (mixture of 2012 and 2012 R2) and am playing with Microsoft's DPM as a backup solution. One of the things it complained about during installation was ensuring the SQL Server service I am configuring it to connect to needs to run under LocalSystem. I did that and everything is fine, but now when I try to do any type of backup of TFS through TFS Admin, it errors out because LocalSystem can't connect to any of our shares on any devices because it's not a domain account.

Suggestions? I already backup the SQL Server instance where TFS is, but I'd like to use their built-in utility as well as a further measure.

This is with SQL 2012 and TFS 2012.

Is it possible to show some type of access log where a valid user (who had access to a specific database [or multiple ones]) tried to access a database they didn't have access to? For example, if I login with a SQL Server account to a database server via SMS and then try to expand a database that my account doesn't have access to, I get a "The database [DBName] is not accessible" error. Is there any type of log to show the user that attempted this? On this same note, is it possible to limit the list of databases shown in SMS to only the one the user has access to and not even show the other ones?

In Server 2008 R2 the Server Manager instance was an all-inclusive tool with which to do everything from a centralized location - IIS, MSMQ, Event Viewer, Services, Disk Management, etc. In Server 2012 the new Server Manager doesn't seem to have the ability to do any of this natively without creating custom MMCs like in the old days.

Am I just missing something or did they really remove this?

I had a standard website hosted on a server I have full control over - www.domain.com. I recently purchased an SSL certificate for this domain in preparation for accepting credit cards and am looking to have all requests redirect to https://www.domain.com. For the most part, the rule I created (see below) works fine - if I type in http://www.domain.com it'll redirect to https://www.domain.com. The problem I have is if I go to an inner link, such as http://www.domain.com/folder/page.aspx, I get a 404 because the only binding ties to HTTPS. How can I make a redirect rule that says any request for www.domain.com gets sent to HTTPS, but retain the original folder/page structure that was requested? So, going to http://www.domain.com/folder/page.aspx sends me to https://www.domain.com/folder/page.aspx. I'd prefer if query string values also stayed intact.

Here is my current rewrite rule:

   <rewrite>
        <rules>
            <rule name="Redirect to HTTPS" stopProcessing="true">
                <match url="(.*)" />
                <conditions>
                    <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="^OFF$" />
                </conditions>
                <action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" />
            </rule>
        </rules>
    </rewrite>

I am trying to create a scheduled backup on a Server 2008 R2 box (using the built-in Windows Server Backup UI). Whenever I run a backup manually (image or otherwise), it works perfectly. When I try to schedule the same backup I get all the way to the end and it pops up an error saying:

Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password

I'm copying to a network drive via a UNC path, but I've confirmed the user/pass I'm entering there are correct (if entered wrong it immediately prompts again). Once this error pops up, I hit OK and the status just says "The backup schedule was not created."

As a final note, this had been tried under both the built-in administrator account and a separate admin account. It's a standalone box (no domain) and both accounts I've tried under are part of the local Administrators group.