Phil Hannent's questions

I've recently been thinking about the TTL of our DNS. We have A records for our servers and then CNAME records for the customer facing names. The www.example.com CNAME points to server-01.example.com for example. In the event of a failure we have the TTL set at 15mins on both the CNAME and A record.

However it dawns on me that this might not be optimal. Surely it should be that A record be 48 hours and the CNAME be 15mins. The CNAME just gets pointed to server-02.example.com in the event of a failure. The A record (in theory should be cached quite happily for a long time, because we use the CNAME as the switcher).

Looking around the Internet I found lots of people having their CNAME long and the A record short: CNAME and A record have different TTLs. Which one will be cached?

This seems contrary to what anybody would want. The question is, does DNS work in the way I hope it works, in that the CNAME request TTL is the important one for if I needed to switch servers in a hurry?

I would like to audit the application pools on an IIS6 server, I want to check which websites relate to each application pool and the .NET version they are running. How can I do this without manually going though the interface and looking at each one in turn?

I have an MSI which is configured for machine level installation because it is a device driver.

I can deploy it via Active Directory and Group Policy just fine. However on a newly booted machine a user can login before the installation has a chance to complete and I get an warning in the event log saying it couldn't complete and will be tried at next reboot.

How can I make the login screen wait for the installation to be completed?

I have a number of Linux virtual machines which I use for building software.

I am finding that I am having to repeat tasks on several machines such as:

• Removing software
• Updating software
• Adding new tools
• Setting up mappings to the Windows Server
• Setting startup applications
• Altering system wide environment variables

Is there are Linux tool for managing computer?

I have an MSI for a driver which I want to deploy via a group policy.

I have a problem with it deploying on 64bit machines and want to log what is happening. The installation works fine as an administrator account, however for a large scale deployment it is not feasible to use the administrator account to deploy this driver.

How can I get the MSI's installation log file for when its being called by the SYSTEM account?

I'd like to have a list of my database servers (I am a developer), I currently have a list of RDP files for different machines I connect to. Is there a similar feature in SQL Server Management Studio that would help me go directly to where I need to go without me having to wait for the login screen to pop up and ask me which server I want?

Just found a fault with a server, other users have had problems connecting to it. The setting on the network card had changed from Private (domain) network to Public (the other option being Home).

The switch to the network interface would have caused the firewall to block a lot of normal functions.

I am guessing that since the event log showed no reason for the change that it might be due to a complete shutdown we had recently where someone powered up the machines, however the domain controllers might not have been booted up first. Any confirmation that this might be the case?

The domain time is now out of sync by 4 mins and its getting on my nerves, I ran a quick check to see if I could determine how much it was out by exactly and got this back:

H:\>w32tm /stripchart /computer:time.windows.com /samples:5 /dataonly
Tracking time.windows.com [65.55.56.112:123].
Collecting 5 samples.
The current time is 31/08/2011 09:46:29.
09:46:29, error: 0x800705B4
09:46:32, error: 0x800705B4
09:46:35, error: 0x800705B4
09:46:38, -241.8117870s
09:46:40, error: 0x800705B4

I get the impression that packets are being dropped, but have no idea how to determine where the packets are getting dropped. Our internet connection is a good high speed network where we don't notice any issues. Could this be an IPv6 thing where its trying that first?

We have an application which interacts with a USB interactive whiteboard.

A customer recently asked if our software would work with XenApp 6.

I am sure our application will, however the hardware is unknown since I don't know how the client side would handle the USB device.

Last time I used Citrix was over 10 years ago with Citrix MetaFrame and back then only a limited support for usb devices was available. Has the situation improved?

I am getting a bunch of warnings about my Exchange not being able to communicate with a servers that have been offline for a while.

The top advice via google appears to be to raise the logging level or use ADSIEdit, however neither options appear to be helping me.

I have two Windows 2008 R2 servers with Exchange 2010 on (SERVER11 and 12). The warnings are all about servers that are offline (SERVER01 in this instance). Any advice as to where I could find the entries for these servers?

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchange ADAccess
Date:          11/10/2010 05:08:10
Event ID:      2159
Task Category: Validation
Level:         Warning
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      SERVER11.elmstonesystems.local
Description:
Process Microsoft.Exchange.RpcClientAccess.Service.exe (PID=3000). Configuration object CN=SMTP (SERVER01-{6CC46919-CDE0-4CCB-9886-E95DA013D1A2}),CN=Connections,CN=First Organization,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=elmstonesystems,DC=local read from SERVER11.elmstonesystems.local failed validation and will be excluded from the result set.  Set event logging level for Validation category to Expert to get additional events about each failure.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
  <System>
    <Provider Name="MSExchange ADAccess" />
    <EventID Qualifiers="32772">2159</EventID>
    <Level>3</Level>
    <Task>6</Task>
    <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-10-11T04:08:10.000000000Z" />
    <EventRecordID>78032</EventRecordID>
    <Channel>Application</Channel>
    <Computer>SERVER11.elmstonesystems.local</Computer>
    <Security />
  </System>
  <EventData>
    <Data>Microsoft.Exchange.RpcClientAccess.Service.exe</Data>
    <Data>3000</Data>
    <Data>CN=SMTP (SERVER01-{6CC46919-CDE0-4CCB-9886-E95DA013D1A2}),CN=Connections,CN=First Organization,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=elmstonesystems,DC=local</Data>
    <Data>SERVER11.elmstonesystems.local</Data>
  </EventData>
</Event>

We are trying out a Windows 2008 R2 Cluster server at the moment.

What is the correct sequence of events for shutting down a cluster for maintenance?

I have an IIS7 server, which people download exe files from.

When people are using Internet explorer the download dialog box says that the size is unknown.

What setting in IIS will allow the clients to know the size of the file?

I have about 20 IIS web sites on one Windows 2003 server. One of the websites is for downloading product updates.

What methods/tools are available to me to ensure that the one does not kill the responsiveness of the others?

Some of our users are getting emails with attachments that are appearing as the mime data still encoded.

Usually 1 in 40 emails with an attachment will just have the raw data (plain text and html syntax and mime encoded attachments) plus there will be strange =20 strings added.

The users are Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2003 performing pop3 pulls every 15mins.

There is AVG network edition with the pop3 scanner running.

If the user asks the sender to resend the message comes through just fine and its not happening from a specific domain, it appears to be a server issue.

Any suggestions?